Me, My Life and I

Look at this - I have a blog! It just happens that I've been needing a place to ramble, and someone reminded me that this was a place I could do such a thing. I have no idea if I'll continue. Apparently I opened the blog years ago and it never went anywhere. But it is here tonight, so I shall use it to soothe my troubled soul.

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Academia. Apparently I'm an academic. How the hell did that happen? It seems to me it was just yesterday that I was serving soda at McDonalds. Now I'm Dr. Zil, Ph.D., trying to figure out the whole "career development" thing.

I talk to my academic "mentors" and they explain how they got to be where they are. They talk about how their parents were Dr. this or Dr. that, and how they struggled to choose medicine or psychology over engineering or finance or whatever the family trade was. How hard that was for them. The questioning they went through. But how they came to figure out they could do something (slightly) different from their highly educated families and still fit in the family line.

I, Dr. Zil, am the child of two people who struggled to finish high school. The child of a part-time secretary and a mechanic. People who truly believe that if you can get a job and hold on to it, you've achieved success. People who truly believe that my getting a Ph.D. is just ridiculous and arrogant and conceited and all the rest. So, here I am, trying to figure out the career development thing, and I have no frame of reference whatsoever to draw on. I've been swimming against the current all the way through. My academic mentors don't understand why it's such a struggle for me to make the decision and to commit at each stage of the game, but I have voices in my head telling me to just Get A Job.

I had a job interview this week. It was for a good job - good pay, great benefits, intellectually stimulating, everything I moved to this city for. A job, in the corporate world. I could do this. I could enjoy it.

I'm preparing for another job interview this coming Friday. Academic. It's a tiny university, but it's a professor position. This school would not be my career. But it would be a stepping stone to the prestigious academic career I'm supposed to be striving for.

Assuming, of course, that I get an offer on both.... Which do I want? The good, stable, interesting job in the city I want to live in? Or the quasi-professor position in a tiny university that would move me forward on a path toward academic prestige?

When is enough enough? Have I done enough academia? Can I just get a job now? Does the fact that I consider the first option to be "just getting a job" mean it's wrong for me? When do I get to lighten up on the whole academic drain and develop... I don't know... LIFE? People tell me there's more to live than work. Academia begs to differ.

Questions, so many questions... and nobody to turn to for answers.