Something Shiny!

I’m all on track to defend my dissertation and graduate in August. All that’s left is to meet a couple of filing deadlines and submit my dissertation to my committee. I have it all planned out. And I like having things all planned out. I like knowing what’s next, what’s around the corner. Before Wednesday, I didn’t have a job lined up for fall or spring, but I assumed I’d be able to adjunct at our local community college. And then this past weekend, I got an email. From across the CLAS, I’d been chosen as one of five graduate students to teach an interdisciplinary humanities course for fall 2010 and spring 2011. It’s a highly selective grant, and it will look terrific on my cv. The only catch? I wouldn’t be able to graduate in August. Or in December. No, in order to take the job, I’d have to postpone graduation for an entire year from today. And that made this an incredibly tough decision. As I say: I’m a planner. I like knowing what’s around the corner. I was ready, in every sense of the word, to graduate. But something kept nagging at me: how often does an opportunity like this come along? How often do you get an email completely out of the blue telling you that you’ve won a grant? So I jumped. I accepted the job. Sure, it’ll mean that I’m ‘just’ a TA for another year. And yeah, it’ll mean that I won’t walk across the stage until a year from today, rather than a few short months from today. But if graduate school has taught me anything, it’s that a year goes by really quickly. And that having everything planned out isn’t always the right path. Sometimes it’s kinda cool to have a monkey wrench thrown into your perfect plan.

This entry was posted on Friday, April 30th, 2010 at 9:07 am and is filed under MeMeMeMeMe, School. 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.