I've had to learn a few things besides my standard course work over the course of this semester. For beginners, the word "laid off" always sounded like a compound word to me but is actually both words separately. I also learned that it is simply a euphemism with little of interest in its etymology. The rest of what i learned was slightly more complicated.
Better off working
If someone would have told me 6 months ago that I could simply avoid dreading monday mornings and get paid 60% of my income to study full time I would have said count me in. To be completely honest, there where times I secretly hoped to be amongst the 30 thousand planned layoffs at my company.
You know the saying though, "be careful what you...". I'm not complaining too much though, at least I'm in school and have the next year or so planned out with school.
I've been working in some form or another since i was 14 years old. I don't sleep in and I constantly crave movement and purpose. That and the fact that I haven't been a full time student since I was 17 years old led me to feel like a hamster on caffeine on a blocky tread-mill. I would start projects up around the house, making myself useful but i just couldn't get traction.
Even in school, after receiving encouragement from my professors I found it hard to settle into a routine around my school work.I thought to myself that i'd rather take a deeper pay cut to take a low paying job and have something to do rather than stay home on unemployment.
Stay busy, find yourself
When I was still working I had plans for how the next year of schooling would go. I would graduate from WSU, finally completing my bachelors degree. With that personal milestone behind me I would finally pursue my own interests.
I'm a technology geek and have always been so. It's almost a joke that I'm thirty one and haven't worked with tech since I was in my teens. Even when I worked in wealth management, I tended to be the go-to-guy for tech questions (those IT guys can be a bit off-putting).So, now i'm home trying to get this "student" thing down again and i'm deciding how i want to go about my second degree project.
Originally it was quiet simple. I selected a decent looking program that allowed me to work full time and achieve a tech oriented second degree. It would get me moving in the right direction while compromising the extent to which i could move into that field. It was like a watered down bachelors in IT.
This is the point where you start to ask the harder questions. What do you want? No, really, what do YOU want to do with your life?
Who do you want to be? How do you want to feel on sunday evening? Understanding that work is exactly that, work, what does your dream job look like?
I googled, I spoke with neighbors and acquaintances in various fields. I spent time really trying to decide what I wanted to do. Then I figured out how to get there.
I'm graduating in 5 days and I will be starting at Umass Lowell one week after that. I'm going to be moving forward, full steam ahead and I wont stop until I'm who I want to be doing what I want to do.
No comments:
Post a Comment