ponder.

[fox]

So I have this job, and I like it fine. It's a research job in my field that doesn't require a doctorate I don't have, so it's a pretty good fit. But I've got "senior" in my title, so there's nowhere further to go without getting the doctorate; every so often noises are made about building some sort of bridge between the assistants and the research scientists so we senior actual-linguist-type assistants would have a little more professional development available to us, but one eventually gives up on any of that actually, you know, happening. (It was not a new concept when I got here two and a half years ago, is what I'm saying.) So this is a good job, but not, I suspect, at least for me, a career. I don't think I can stay here forever. How much longer before I get buggy: hard to say. I could, in theory, go back -- again -- and get the doctorate, but in practice that's a non-starter. I can't face leaving work to be a full-time student again and accumulating tens (if not hundreds) of thousands of dollars more debt, and to do it part-time here at the university where I work, even if they'd approve it, would take more years than I'm prepared to sink into it, because I'd have to do a certain amount of coursework again and in short, all these are things I would gladly do if I wanted it badly enough, and the fact that they are deal-breakers is to me a sign that I do not. I'm fine with that. I want a degree with a D in it, but I want to have it, not get it. Life is like that sometimes. :-)

The question becomes where to go from here, when I go from here, someday. As coincidence would have it, I had been thinking -- very, very idly -- about library school, because there are jobs and even career paths that I think appeal to me and I think I would fit well in and be good at that seem to require that specific degree, when ellen_fremedon started telling me it figured prominently in her five-year plan (for Getting the Hell Out of DC), and her plan sort of fanned the spark of my idle contemplation, and now I'm sort of wondering. It looks like I could do it in two and a half, maybe three years part-time if I also did classes through the summers. But as I said to Smug Bastard (MLS) just now,

I'm not sure (a) if this is a reasonable plan -- law school, for example, is 12 hours a week full-time and only 9 hours a week part-time, so it's not a huge time savings, and everyone I've ever known who has done a law degree part time or even known anyone who has done a law degree part time agrees it's murder and only to be seen as a last resort -- and (b) if it's even a plan I want to undertake. Sometimes when I think about library and archive type jobs I think that's right up my street (not, you know, school and public librarying, so much, but archives and professional libraries, sure), and it seems you can't get such a job without that particular degree (two other master's degrees be damned); other times, I think it's been three years since I left grad school and that's the longest I've ever gone without being a student of any kind, and maybe that's why I'm getting hung up on this now.

I will also be pestering wholenother. But to make a long story short: there's plenty of you with library-science degrees as well. Tell me about library school, if you please.

Comments

[dira]

everyone I've ever known who has done a law degree part time or even known anyone who has done a law degree part time agrees it's murder and only to be seen as a last resort

ahahahhahahahahAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAAAHAHA oh, that was hilarious there, the way you made an analogy between law school and library school. Um. Don't do that. Really. Don't. Perhaps you never heard me refer to my MLS as my Fisher Price My First Master's Degree but, seriously, it is nothing like the level of work or stress that goes into ... really any other kind of graduate school, as far as I can tell. If you think an MLS would be a good degree to have, I wouldn't get too terribly hung up on the workload involved in getting one (although the school I went to had a special archives track which was in fact more labor-intensive than the no-particular-specialty track I was on, so ymmv). Also, the school I attended regarded 9 hours as full time, 12 as crazy and probably a bad idea, and 6 as more-than-half-time-so-you-qualify-for-federal-aid.

[fox]

I did hear you say that, in fact, which is another thing that makes me stop and go "hmm", because like I said: two of the damn things already. Sigh. But, it is good to know (a) what you say about full-time-vs-part-time over here, and (b) that library school is not in the law-school league w/r/t part-time being just as much of a killer as full time if not more so. Yay?

[dira]

Well, I mean, OTOH, I have a friend with a JD who's practicing law and keeps contemplating getting an MLS, because she might be happier as a law librarian/full-time researcher than actually working as a lawyer. There's nothing wrong with not getting it first, I just suspect that it will not seem like much of a challenge compared to other degrees.

So. Yay? indeed.