What I want to be when I grow up

This post is inspired by something my husband said last week. He met a new post-doc at the non-academic lab he works at and this post-doc asked my husband, who is also a post-doc, “what number post-doc is this for you?” When he got home he told me that he wasn’t interested in having multiple post-doc positions and moving around the country (world) any more than we already have. He is now sitting in his home office learning a computer programming program so he can apply for a job in our dream location on the west coast. What he studies now is very theoretical, this job he is applying for is about studying earthquakes working for the government. The ad states that many days maybe spent doing field work in remote wilderness areas. This sounded so much more interesting to my husband than his many days/nights he spends on the beamline doing lab work. He also commented about how he is having trouble doing a new experiment at his current job because while he has a fellowship he has little money for research and no one (not the guy in the lab next door or a fellow researcher in another state) will collaborate him and let him use the apparatus he needs for his experiment.

I found this conversation with my husband interesting. I get the feeling that we are both ready to “nest.” You know, settle down, start our “real” lives. Buy a house, have a child, all of those “normal” things people do. I’ve been trying to tell myself for this past year that all will come in due time and just because we are 30-ish and haven’t achieved the “American dream” yet doesn’t mean we aren’t normal people. (I apologize for my over use of parenthesis quotations).

So this brings me to the title of this post, What I want to be when I grow up. My mom told me that the first job I wanted was to be a bath-tub-filler-upper. Cute? I guess my 5 year old brain noticed that I, myself, could not fill up my own bath. My mom had to do it. Hell, maybe she couldn’t even fill up her own bath. Imagine the market, all these people across the world needing their baths filled up. . . . .

My brain was easily influenced in elementary school. I remember an assembly where they showed a shriveled up lung, caused by smoking cigarettes and to this day I have never smoked one. We had a safety assembly and I came home and put buckle up stickers in my parents cars and was the buckle-up police well into high school. In addition, “I gave a hoot and didn’t pollute.” I conserved water and sometime around 3^rd grade I decided I wanted to save the earth. I remember we watched something on a TV in class about the environment. All I can remember now was at the end there were a bunch of actors stating ways to save the earth. I remember Chevy Chase stating that one should shower with a friend. And so began my quest as an environmentalist.

Some years later I heard about a big oil spill. At this point I decided that I wanted to be the person who went to the spill and cleaned up the soil.

Every summer I went with my mom and her family to this beautiful beach town for a week or two. This town happen to have a good university. My great grandma would drive me up there and give me tours of the campus. So, I put my desire to be an environmentalist together with these summer vacations and decided to go to that university to study environmental studies. It was here that I was told that I could not double major in ES and chemistry. So I switched to a geology major (I saw a flyer that stated geology is environmental studies and one of the careers it listed was soil scientist), where the requirements included chemistry and math, unlike the ES major (where they encouraged doubling in biology or politics). I had a one point decided I wanted to be an environmental lawyer but it only took one policy and politics class for me to decide that I’d rather be the person who did the science that policy was based on (hopefully in the next administration this will be true).

So for the next four years I studied to be a geologist. In my fourth year I landed a student position working with the USGS for a soil scientist. This position was great, I worked closely with three positive female role models, one was the chief scientist. We studied carbon budgets in the boreal forest and I got to do field work in Alaska and Canada and work with soil! I wasn’t cleaning it like I thought in elementary school but this was pretty much my dream job. They hired me as a technician after I graduate college. But I did more than just lab and field work. I also wrote reports, analyze data, they took me to meetings and I could propose my own research.

So how did it come to be that I left this job? A man. . . . my now husband took me away. We actually spent 15 months apart because there was no way in hell I was leaving the west coast and leaving my awesome job for some man. But then, I missed him, and I thought about it. Was a job really more important than this man I love? I decided not. So I applied to get my master’s degree where he was in dissertation town on the east coast. I got accepted and really love my research. In reality I may have never gone to graduate school if it wasn’t for my husband. I expected to quit at my master’s degree but I really loved the project and it was starting to get interesting so I stayed . .. . and now I’m struggling to finish.

Sorry this story is getting so long.
Now that I’m getting ready to graduate and find a job I have to ask myself, what do I want to do. If you go back a few paragraphs the answer would be save the earth, clean up soil, so why is it that I’m looking at job descriptions for faculty positions. My only answer to this is that it seems this is what someone does with a Ph.D. I had a conversation, about two years ago, at a laundry mat with someone from the humanities department and when I told him I didn’t want to be professor he gave me this look of discuss. When I look at positions with consulting companies I think to myself that I’ve just wasted the last four years of my life getting a Ph.D. I guess I could save the earth as a faculty member, you know in between teaching classes and administrative duties. I just know that there are so many of you out there who have dreamed of being a professor, that wasn’t my dream, so how can I compete with you all.

I think this idea of being a faculty member was also instilled in me at a meeting last spring. My adviser had a special session for him, for his 70^th bday, and the convener mentioned that something like 70% of his former students were now faculty. I thought, hey I could do that do. Two summers ago I mentored a young women in high school. I thought, hey this was cool, I like to mentor students in research. Can I mentor students if I work at a consulting firm? A few months ago I mentioned an old TA of mine came to stay with us. He is now at a university with no graduate students and his responsibilities are 75% teaching, 25% research. That sounded like a nice job. But how do I save the earth if I’m teaching 75% of the time.

*Sigh* I should stop now before this post gets abusively long. I had hoped by writing this all out I would get an epiphany and decide what to do with my life after graduation, but I feel just as confused now as I did when I started. I guess like I stated in my theme I just need to live in the moment and focus on my manuscripts and dissertation.