Still questioning....

I'm 75% through my first academic year.  How has it gone?  For the most part, not disasterous.  Dream job? Hell no.

For one, I don't want to work this hard. It's a ridiculous pace. I don't even know if having the four-month summer without classes will make up for it. It's not "off", not by a long shot. It's just different.

I also hate giving students bad grades. It has to be done, when they earned 'em, but I really, really hate it. Students crying in my office, or angry at me, flipping off insults... It happens. Students want great marks and think they deserve them because they paid tuition. Sometimes they do things wrong. Sometimes they fail. They need to fail to learn. But I hate, hate being the one to fail them. It's misery.

I'm having problems in one of my courses. Really, considering that I had basically no prep time for the slew of new courses I'm giving, it's amazing that it's happening in only one course. But still. It sucks. Students are angry. A minority like the course, but the majority are flinging the insults and bad evaluations and are just pissed off. Are they justified? Maybe they're justified to some degree -- the course is clearly not what it would have been if I had a couple months to prepare it. But they way they're going about expressing their dissatisfaction is immature, insulting, demoralizing.  I dread stepping into the classroom at this point. I would love to just not show up. It's misery.

This year was a trial run. I wanted to see if the professor thing was right for me. I'm thinking maybe it's not. The thing is, I would rather be DOING it than teaching it. They say once I've taught the same courses for a few years running it becomes much easier and I can spend more time on research. I'm not sure that's good enough.  Or am I just reacting to that one shitty course?

I talked about sacrifice a while back. What am I willing to sacrifice and what am I not?  I want a life. I want a job that is relatively meaningful, but I don't at all about things like prestige. I would really like to live in the city of my choice.

It seems to me that a few months back I was thinking I'd be willing to sacrifice the city to have this type of job. Now I feel like I'd rather change jobs than live in a crap town like this one. Ghad, and I still questioning my career path all these years later?

This week, I applied for a non-academic job in the city I want to live in.  I would LOVE to get this job. It would be a dream job. I would leave academia in a heartbeat.  Will I get it? I doubt it. I'm overeducated but underqualified. I've got the advanced degree, but it's not in quite the right area and I've never worked in quite the right area. It's a pretty desirable job, I'm thinking, due to the organization and the city and all the rest. Can I somehow shape myself toward that job?

I also keep going back to this job, the non academic one I was talking about. I could do that. I could be satisfied with the meaningfulness of it. It is in the city I want to be in. I could have a life outside of work. I could have job stability, which is just a nightmare in academia right now.  Once I get through this next academic job talk, I think I'll clean up my c.v. and send it to them again. They're not advertising for the job, but I want them to remember me.