Academic Cycles

This week, in addition to launching this fabulous blog, I also started up a new job. It's nothing fancy - it's a work-study position in an academic department at the university I'm attending for graduate school. I worked as a teaching assistant in this department during the fall semester, but thanks to a confusing maze of college policies, politics and pollution (of the intellectual variety), the professors weren't allowed to hire me back.

Which has led me to sit at the front desk of this small department, answering phones and sorting mail and directing visitors to where they need to go. Tomorrow I'll get to work on updating their website. As a student position, it's very decent. I loved teaching, but from the standpoint of doing my own work for my classes, this serves as a very viable alternative. I'll spend less time working for this job than I did teaching but make the same amount of money. Not a lot of taxing work + free time to dig into stuff for my own classes + a solid pay rate = quality job.

Plus, having become friends with the people who work in the department (and who are over-taxed on a daily basis due to a lack of practical support from other professionals), I feel honestly rewarded in helping them out. I feel better about this job than any one I had in my undergrad years, and I liked my undergrad jobs.

Why I Am Awesome: new job, making decent money, helping out friends and not having it interfere with my school work. I probably couldn't have scripted a better position for myself, and you know how much I love scripting perfect things.

For the past four years, before taking the masters-program leap, I worked in university administration. The benefits were solid, the hours respectable, and I never felt in danger of being downsized or laid off. But more often than not, the job(s) would be hellish. Over-educated professors clashing with under-educated administrators, none of them having a clue how to maintain a decent organizational structure, but having the clout and the budget to do anything they want...except give you that raise they promised.

Have you ever heard the pithy aphorism that the reason the politics in academia are so vicious because the stakes are so small? Well, it's true. And you know who gets hit with the most shrapnel from that viciousness? The unassuming little guy who only took the job to make some money and take some free classes, the one who never wanted to carve out a career path and who just wants to do a good job and leave at the end of the day feeling fine about his life. That's who.

(By little guy, I am of course referring to my relative position on the job ladder; sadly, the stress of these positions did not stop my from eating and cause me to drop 50 pounds in an unhealthy yet svelte-inducing manner.)

I won't bore you with stories about my escapades - they're probably more whiny than anything else, and part of me still thinks I can use them for something worthwhile in the future. But it's fair to say that when I packed up my cubicle (not an office, couldn't be an office, the world would end if they gave me an office) back in August to head west and start school again, I told myself I was free from the anchor of my crappy jobs. That I wouldn't continue down this path. That the last place I would ever find myself again was back in a desk in a university department, answering phones from behind a three-foot partition.

Why I Am Not Awesome: I spent at least fifteen minutes today thinking I might never, ever be able to leave this horrible track I have set for myself due to a lack of focus and strong initiative. I pictured myself someday ending up with office window lettering declaring me the Associate Dean of Super Not Awesomeness. And the worst part was I thought of all of this after I left work, which means I didn't even get paid to think about it.