I went to get advised today and ended up talking with my professor for quite awhile. It was a good conversation, but I can't help but feel torn on what I want I want to do with my life.
We discussed the fact that I want to be a professor and he basically told me that getting published is key to being hired and kept as a professor. This makes sense as it seems to be key to getting tenure anyway. What he basically told me was the best way of doing this was to go to school for my masters and Ph.D. and then maybe do a postdoc and/or work in industry for a bit and that basically then I would be really hirable at a research institute. Here's what I'm thinking at this point in the conversation: no wonder there aren't many female professors in my department. By the time I got through all that school and work, I'd probably be about 30. My final goal in life is not to get married, but I would love to be married and have a family some day, which often happens around that age. I don't necessarily want to be "successful" in life. That's not my goal and that's not my reason for wanting to be a professor. It's not for the lifestyle; it's not to be able to be my own boss. I want to interact with students. I want to teach and I want to teach well. I think I'm going to stop telling people that I want to be a professor and start saying that I want to be a teacher. Unless I absolutely fall in love with research in grad school, I don't think that's what I'd want to focus on. I may just have to be a lecturer. I don't know. It was just an odd conversation and I could tell that I wasn't on the same wavelength as he was.
Other than that, life is going quite well. I survived my three tests last week. They weren't stellar, but they'll do. I think I'm mostly caught up on all the prerequisite material I was lacking at the beginning of the semester, which is wonderful because that means classes are getting a bit easier material-wise.
I got stuff about ordering graduation invitations in the mail yesterday. Scary. I don't want to graduate. Maybe I should change my major. Engineering Physics would do nicely for keeping me here another three years...
That's all. I'm going to go slip into cyber-oblivion for another month now.
1 comment:
Explore your options; go on a roadtrip:
www.roadtripnation.com
Have you thought about teaching at a smaller school where you don't need a Ph.D.? There are also schools that don't really focus on research. The professors in my program have Ph.D.s, but they don't do research now. A lot of them work in the industry and lecture or just teach.
Good luck with figuring out your life.
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