And how does that make you feel?

So, my enrollment form for Fall 2005 came in the mail today, right in the middle of my paltry, pathetic excuse for a weekly career crisis. I nearly shredded the damn thing along with the daily ream of credit card offers. (Ha! They don't know what we know! Give us a few months and those offers will either disappear, or double in number but with interest rates in the upper usury ranges!)

Great jumping Joneses, I don't know what I want to do with a degree. Most of the time, I think I want something in public management, along the lines of my boss's job; other days I want to be a policy researcher for ill-informed legislators; still other days I just want to glom onto some random nonprofit that's desperate to keep anybody at all on staff.

And as attractive as these prospects are, the thing is, do I need to keep going to school for any of them? What do I want to be when I grow up?

(Won't the google-searchers have a good time with that phrase.)

I dreamed I suddenly remembered I was enrolled in a college class. I looked everywhere for my classroom. Then I arrived and sat down at a desk. It turned out, today was the final exam. But I hadn't studied - worse than that, I hadn't even opened a book! What do you think it means?

Dream Analyzer: Classroom = ready to learn something; overturned = great disorder; book = record-keeping.

Me: What the hell is this?

Dream Analyzer: It's, uh ... it's a dream analysis.

Me: It is?

Dream Analyzer: Yeah.

Me: How is this a dream analysis?

Dream Analyzer: Well, you type in your dream, and I take the major themes, and offer a perspective that helps you make sense of the images and gain deeper knowledge of your own psyche. It's pretty straightforward.

Me: ..... Oh, is it.

Dream Analyzer: Mmm. All the great psychologists do this.

Me: Really.

Dream Analyzer: Yeah.

Me: All psychologists.

Dream Analyzer: Yeah. Well, the great ones.

Me: All that schooling they go through, all those years in college. You cynically think that this is what they're about - just sitting around, all thesaurus-like, regurgitating what the patient says and making it sound unique.

Dream Analyzer: Well, yeah!

Me: Kewl. Is it too late to change my major?

Comments

[BB]

We love to hate all graduate programs. You have really responded to this one, and I seee a good change in your confidence. I think your ablities are being honed- but why does it always have to be so hard? It's all the emotional feces that made my masters so painful.

[Kimberly]

Oh hell yeah. I like that term "emotional feces" it really describes the phenomenon well. I didn't know that getting a masters was going to be so much more than taking some classes and increasing my debt. I just know that you'll go further in whatever you decide to do by getting yours. Hang in there!

[maya]

Pamela, we love you. Stay in the program, sweetie-darling. No one can cut short a certain econ prof's sermon like you can. That deserves an honors designation all its own.

I am also very confused about where I'd like to take my degree, but I, unlike you, know that I don't want to do budgets!

[Wende]

Oh, so feel your pain. I'm finishing an MDiv only to NOT get ordained. I have no idea what I want to do--but I'm pretty sure of what I don't want to do with it. I'm with BB--if it's making a difference in YOU, then the rest will follow. Or so IZ keeps telling me.

[Jo]

You are a star, dear. Persist.