Goals

Have you ever spent $120,000 (plus interest) on higher education and then decided that you don't want to practice the profession you paid so much to get into? I started out my freshman year as a communications major, and now, with a Humanities BA and a Master of Arts in Teaching under my belt, I wish I'd stuck with it. I'm grateful to my BA for interdisciplinary thinking it introduced me to, for the philosophy, the history, and the literature. Unfortunately, there are only two or three classes (in addition to my student teaching) that I recall being vaguely useful in my graduate program.

Now, why did I spend so much money on school? My parents wanted me to attend a Seventh-day Adventist university (read: private AND expensive) and I blindly agreed. Blindly as in I chose not to research my options. My parents went to college in the 70's and recall being able to pay for an entire year of school off of one summer's earnings. They seemed to think my experience would be the same. When I worked summers, one summer's worth of work would barely cover one half of a quarter at the university I attended (and that would mean spending NONE of said money). My parents, being registered nurses, also found work immediately out of college. I'm not even sure that they owed any money. So, with this blithe understanding they sent me on my way with nary a word of caution until after they'd cosigned several loans and I was in neck-deep.

The summer I marched across the stage and received my BA diploma-holder (I still had several directed reading courses to finish) was the beginning of a vicious depression spiral. I had no idea how I would earn a living wage with a Humanities degree. I repeatedly postponed my directed reading and got a job at Staples. My parents augmented my meager income so I could stay afloat, but sadly, staying afloat included getting so drunk that I broke some teeth out (incurring a $3500 hospital bill that I managed to get waived) and then getting engaged to the wrong man.

Once engaged to "the" wrong man who was attending the very university I'd graduated from, all my student loans began kicking in. Living on about $1000 a month I was in no position to even conceive of paying them; I started talking to my old professors about possible careers and one of them threw out the idea of teaching. "Well," I thought to myself, "that sounds like something I could do." Because my husband had two years of school left it fit perfectly as it would take me the same amount of time to complete the teaching masters program. So, just as blithely as my parents directed me to get my first degree, I blithely marched into my second.

And here I am. Life is an open book waiting for me to write upon its pages (to borrow a poor metaphor) but I worry that I've mucked up the beginning so much (at least career-wise) that the rest is unsalvageable. I'm a substitute teacher who loathes a great majority of the students she meets. There are scarcely any teaching jobs available and even if there were, the thought of being stuck in a classroom, day after day, makes me feel stifled, cornered, trapped! I want to be around adults! I want to work with intelligent, knowledge-seeking ADULTS. Well, crud.