When I started college, my intention was to get my Bachelor’s degree in history, then go on to get a Master’s and, eventually, a doctorate. My end goal was to teach history at the university level. Now that I’m almost done with my Bachelor’s – if all goes well, I’ll have it this summer – I’m not so sure about my plan.
It’s not that my time at college has sapped me of my love for history, or that I don’t think I could do the work to get the other degrees. I still love the subject, and, not to pat my own back, but I think I would excel in graduate school. Rather, it’s that I’m afraid that there’s a very good possibility that I could spend 5-7 more years in school and end up not being able to find a tenure track position – and quite frankly, I don’t really have any great desire to join the droves of unemployed PhD holders.
Then again, it’s what I really want to do, or at least think I want to do. I’ve enjoyed the academic setting, the learning, the sharing of ideas. I’m worried about jobs later on down the road, yes, but I’m also fairly positive that if I don’t at least have a go at “The Plan,” twenty years from now, I’m going to be kicking myself.
I suppose I’m basically just waffling here. I know what I want to do, and I’ve known it since basically day one of college. But now that push is coming to shove, I’m (naturally?) having doubts. Friends and family that I’ve spoken to have all urged me to go for it; now if I could just convince myself that it’s what I should do.
Yesterday I broke a major rule: I bought myself something right before Christmas. My friend Joshua told me that amazon.com had dropped the price for the complete Farscape series down to $58. This is a pretty awesome deal, as the individual seasons hover around $30 each (the first one is $45). At first I was going to hold off on it until post-holidays, but the more I thought about it, the less I liked the idea; if I were to go to amazon.com in January and see the price raised back up to nearly $150, I’d kick myself.
I watched Farscape years ago when it was first aired, but I’m fairly positive I didn’t see all of the episodes. What I did see, I’ve completely forgotten, so I’m looking forward to watching it again. It should be interesting for another reason: I’m about halfway through season 8 of Stargate SG-1. Assuming I start Farscape shortly after I get it, I’ll soon be watching Ben Browder and Claudia Black switch back and forth between their Farscape and SG-1 roles. Whether mass confusion will ensue, we’ll see.
Ah, freedom – almost. I have but one final left, tomorrow, and then I’ll be done with this semester.
It’s been a rough one. While I’ve always been busy to some degree during college, this semester had me swamped all the time. Through a weird bit of Unglück (bad luck), I ended up in classes which all had heavy writing workloads. It’s truly been a case of finish one paper, start two more. The papers are thankfully done, though, so I can breathe a sigh of relief about that.
I’m looking forward to being able to, you know, do things other than read, write, and study. I’ll be reading some more books, certainly, but books that weren’t assigned to me. And I’ll be watching Stargate. And doing other things that are relatively mindless in comparison to what I’ve been doing lately.
(Oh, and yes, I’m aware of the irony of celebrating being done with writing papers by writing a blog post. I’m a strange creature.)
There’s a first time for everything, I guess. Or at least a lot of things – I can think of many things I’ll never be convinced of trying. Anyway… After years of regularly buying things online and having them delivered to my door (or to my porch, as the case often is), something I bought was stolen. Last week I ordered a new, larger backpack from amazon.com, as the one I have is 1) not big enough to comfortably hold all of my crap and 2) falling apart in a few places.
The tracking information shows that it was delivered yesterday morning, but I was gone until around 3PM. I got the regular mail, and figured that the package just hadn’t arrived yet – it wasn’t even supposed to be here until the 27th. It was only later in the evening that I checked out the tracking, and was informed that the item I hadn’t found on my porch had been delivered. Oops.
I called the post office, and they weren’t a great deal of help. Essentially: “It was delivered. Sorry for your luck.” I didn’t expect much more than that (they did do their part, after all), but the lady I spoke to could have been a little sympathetic, no? Amazon, as usual, seems to be willing to bend over backwards to achieve customer satisfaction. They told me that if the post office doesn’t come up with the package, they’ll send me another one with overnight shipping. While I do want my backpack, I’m going to feel pretty weird / bad about accepting the replacement. Amazon did their part – they shipped the item to me, and it even arrived ahead of time. Why should they eat the cost of another one because some asshat stole the box from my porch?
Update: I assumed right away that the box was delivered to my house and then stolen from my porch, but after thinking on it some more, I’m not sure that’s the case. It may have actually been delivered somewhere else. The tracking shows that it was delivered at 9:11AM, but our mail never runs that early. Usually it’s in the early to mid-afternoon when stuff shows up. That, and I was still home at 9:11 – not for long, as I had class at 10, but I was in the house, and I heard no knocking, etc.
