My plan is to have a career
I am not what you would call an ambitious person. I have aspirations: I’d like to be happy, live comfortably, earn money with work that is enjoyable and fulfilling. This is not a long-term goal: I aim to meet these needs in the present – and most days, I do. Today is not one of those days.
I am having something of a meltdown concerning the sprawling intentions of my dissertation. It’s water: on a flat surface (that would be me, while life keeps getting in the way of intellectual depth), it just wants to spread. I’m trying to scoop enough of it up to fill a 25-page glass. Wait, mixed metaphors. Never mind. I just needed a break from beating my head against it during this writing retreat, so I thought I’d turn to the comparatively finite task of filling out some paperwork for grants I’ll need next year.
Poor decision. I found myself confronted with the task of describing my career plans and goals in less than 3500 words. For those of you playing the home game, that’s about 15 double-spaced pages, five times the permissible length of the project description for this particular grant. The autobiography doesn’t need to be that long, but I’m stunned that it is allowed to be. I don’t think I could fill 15 pages with a description of where I think I’m going and what I’d like to be doing. It only took me about 16 words, above.
Feel free to compete with my astonishing concision (or lack of ambition?) by commenting in a haiku about your own career goals. Or freefrom poetry. What do I care? I am clearly a woman without delineation or direction.
careers help to pay
bills but i still long to sleep
in every day
I have a career and enjoy it. I still couldn’t tell you where I want to be in a few years other than to express my desire to still enjoy what I do. I think it is supposed to be some mark of growing up, or being a grown-up, to have some kind of master plan. I refuse to drink that Kool Aid.
-Rick
PS: I really do wish I could sleep in every day. Given the opportunity, though, I think it would get boring and lose the “specialness” it has on the rare occasion I do get to do it.
not in any way a competition–just a sharing of my (oddly concurrent, quasi-existential) crisis. and for the record, i think your aspirations are lovely, not at all unclear, and totally attainable by you and for you. and by-the-by, what would one call the form of several (slightly western) haiku strung together?
choose your own adventure: career style
fulfillment eludes
time to let go – erase my
sense of who i am
is the picture of
the real thing more comforting
than the lack of it?
spoiled, self-indulgent
lonely and afraid now that
my choice is removed
the wanting, having –
ambition and fulfillment –
pale. irrelevant.
Future feels different
Than I expected to be
unsure what to do
Rick – I think you’re right on both counts. “Having a career” is one of those things that is so heavily valued as positive that it’s hard to break out of that thought pattern. It’s even weirder in higher education, because degrees cost so much in America that there’s a very real pressure to make that money pay you back.
I used to sleep in all the time. Being a tour guide was about fifteen hours of work a week, and the rest of the time I read, visited museums, did crossword puzzles, drank. I was so bored. That’s why I’m here.
Ecentipede – not sure. I like to call them diptychs or triptychs when I do 2 or 3, but 4! That’s just excessive! : )
Don’t worry. Your choices are never removed. Limited, yes, by forces beyond your control. But if you do not find something pleasant, at least you will find something new!
Kyoske, kind of the same thing. A lot of my friends are reaching a crisis point where they are about to complete their long-term, expensive schooling… and will be ejected into a market that has pared itself down to less than essentials. Eternal optimist that I am, I just hope everyone finds work they like even if it isn’t making the most of their expertise… for now. And I hope that future employers in your field won’t blink if many of you list work experience outside of your field – after all, everyone knows that barely anyone’s hiring, doesn’t it speak for good character if you find satisfying work to tide you over?
My first life goal should be to become more familiar with the word “concision.”
…… …… wait for it …… ……
Now that that’s done I can move on to building a secondary education system as I think it should be designed and supporting and/or building effective NGO’s to spread education and opportunity around the world.
But first I had to get ‘concision’ down.
To speak to your quandary though, tanglethis, while I’ve, like most, had many a professor and course pontificate the virtues of having short term and long term goals and aspirations, such people who are blessed enough to actually have such solid long term ‘career goals’ are rare. Even those of us who know what we want to do, more often than not, find a very circuitous path to that object, should we even reach it in the form we envisioned it.
I’m lucky enough that I know my ultimate goals and what I think I’d most enjoy as a livelihood, but it’s becoming just such an indirect path. Fortunately, the indirect route tends to lend itself to a greater array of skills and experience methinks.
P.S. I love your water over a flat surface metaphor, boy if I don’t feel that way often! …particularly with time and obligations. The time to spend going into depth in just about anything seems most often to surrender to the necessity of simply accomplishing all the ‘must does’ of the moment.