ponder.

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.

torchwood

( spoilers )