The Road to Employment....

My Director asked today, "Have you read any of the Chronicle?" No, I say. "Well, you need to read this article. It's about why NOT to go to humanities grad school." Her exact words I can't recall, but you get the idea.

So, off I go reading this article. (By the way, you can find it here and it worth every second of your time to read.) I said to myself as I read the article, "This was me like five years ago!" Unbelievable! I was a star-struck grad student working on my masters in history with great aspirations of getting my Ph.D. and becoming a professor. So, when the first go around of applications I sent out came back, it was nearly a unanimous NO, aside from one acceptance with NO FUNDING. I was extremely distraught!

By this time I had secured a full time job with with a state institution (I have been full time temporary for years) and this opened the door to free education. So, I bided my time by going to Archival Science school and waited for the next application season to begin. Ha! I got in another Ph.D. program, but with NO FUNDING!! Some decisions had to be made.

First, I got a whole ton of rental information mailed to me about where I was potentially going to live. Not good - way expensive. In addition, the first realization that I would NEVER find a job entered my mind. "What if I spend like 50 to 75 thousand for a degree and never get a job in like 10 years?" Something was wrong with that equation. Lucky for me, I had a Plan B.

Plan B was library science school. I had been working in a library for years at this point and applied to library school on a whim. I got in! I called them and ask if I could defer my admission one year and they said yes! Well, that year was up and I needed to get in, so I went to library school. Librarianship was my second career choice, but it was almost a certain bet that I would get a job upon graduation....within six months of graduation anway. (Took me three, actually.)

So, here I am, the cynical librarian that you see before you now! Grad school in the humanities was a course for self-destruction, a collision course with a moon, so to speak, and I was able to divert my flight path in time to avoid oblivion. I still consider myself an historian as much as I do a librarian, though there will never be a time when I will be history professor it seems.

Universities are too much about vocations and not about knowledge and the love of learning anymore, hence the decline of the humanities. I am glad I changed course when I did because being a librarian is a great job...a job with benefits...and not just an adjunct posting.