Please feel free to add more to the list of questions.  This is tons of fun!

Today I’m going to go with a “work” theme for a Monday:

From Lisa

I want to know how you decided what you wanted to do in life BEFORE you became pregnant.

It depends on when you would have asked me.  When I was nine, I would have told you I wanted to be a backup singer in a band.   In high school, I was really into music, and was dead-set on becoming a high school orchestra director.  I only looked at colleges that offered music education majors.  I was completely and utterly focused on that goal.  Long story short, I realized I didn’t like playing my instrument for a grade (and really, really sucked at practicing), and dropped the major after one single solitary semester.  Ah, college!

Anyways, I ended up in a psych major, and then more of a counseling major, which was more my style.  Always the touchy-feely type.  I thought I would go to graduate school for marital & family therapy (my dad has been married four times – you don’t have to look far for motivation), but changed my mind when I realized I’d graduate a measly 24 years old and have to tell married couples what to do.  Ha!  Inspiration struck around Christmas of my senior year in college.  I decided that, of all things, I rather liked the whole college application process, and wanted to become a guidance counselor.  So, I did.

Grad school, internship, nail-biting job search.  Spent two years doing it in a suburban high school, and hated it.  I still really enjoyed the college stuff.  It was all of the other crap that made me crazy.  The entitlement, the helicopter parents, the parents who insist it was my fault that their child wasn’t going to class.  The students being hospitalized for suicide attempts after the other kids wouldn’t sit with them at lunch.  The special ed meetings. It was a lot of drama and a shit-ton of bureaucracy.

I found I was much happier working in higher ed.  Academic advising at the college level was still interesting and fun to work with the students, but lower pressure.  The environment was a much better fit.  And, though this is going to sound horribly snobby, the students were not entitled to be there.  If they didn’t want to be there, or if they flunked all of their classes… they left.  That was kind of refreshing.  I know, from bleeding-heart counselor to heart-of-stone.  Don’t get me wrong, I was more than willing to help people and help them find resources and help them succeed.  But they’re adults.  If they wanted to shoot themselves in the foot and not go to class – not my problem, really.

My last job was a great fit, and in addition to the advising, also included some admissions work.  Tons of fun, and I do miss it.  But here’s the thing – my job is not my calling.  It’s not really my passion.  I enjoyed it, I was good at it.  But (at the risk of sounding cheesy), in truth, I knew that this was what I always wanted to do.  This, right here.  The full-time, diaper-changing, snot-wiping, tantrum-busting.  It has it’s sucky days, as all jobs do. But I always knew I wanted to do it.

On related notes, from Carrie and Beverly:

Do you intend to go back to work when the kids are a certain age? If you do go back, do you think you will stay on the same career path?

Do you ever think about going back to work when Daniel and Rebecca are in school? If so, what would your dream job be?

I do suspect I’ll go back when the kids are in school (pre-school, at the earliest, but maybe older), and I imagine I’ll stay in roughly the same field.  I like being on an academic calendar, I like working in education.  And, in general, it tends to be pretty family-friendly.

Ideally, I’d love to find a part-time job and not have to deal with too much childcare coordination.  I’d happily go back to higher ed on a part-time basis (I’m not sure I could do 5-days-a-week, 9-5, after getting used to being home full-time!).  Or, if I could find a big high school like the one I went to, big enough that it actually had a college/career advising center… I would love to run one of those.  Bring in admissions reps and speakers from different career paths, help kids find good matches.  And while you can’t get rid of 100% of the drama, at least some of the parts I hated the most would not be my responsibility.

Though I once toyed with the idea, I do not think I would want to be one of those private college counselors.  I mean, it’s good money and all of that… but the inappropriate expectations, overbearing parents, and insane pressure would be entirely too much for me.  Plus, I kind of think the whole profession is a racket and just feeds into the swirling insanity around the whole process right now.

Tags: reader questions

This entry was posted on Monday, December 1st, 2008 at 7:30 am and is filed under Just me, Working. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.