Thoughts
Things on the upcoming agenda:
-Going to visit Florida next weekend! (My dying Aunt is visiting, which is really sad, but I am excited to see her.)
-Interview with the director of the Physician Assistant program at Duke on Wednesday!!
-Art class starting on January 25!
-I am probably going into a local elementary school in March to give a presentation for Brain Awareness Week!!! (What a fun concept, Brain Awareness Week. I think we are going to color brains and make neurons out of pipe cleaners.)
-hopefully I can kick my ass enough to get this academic paper out soon (and convince someone they should publish it).
-hopefully get IRB approval for my study with Wii Fitness and the elderly, and start playing some Wii with the 60+ crowd.
I am back on the fence degree-wise. Still thinking of both the physician assistant programs and the PhD in clinical psychology programs.
I've realized I am happiest when I am working with people. I hate writing grants. I hate writing Internal Review Board proposals. I hate sitting in an office. I hate writing academic papers. I hate feeling like my thoughts and ideas are constantly under fire and on the operating table. I hate the idea of being in school until I'm 29, spending 2 years doing a post-doc fellowship, and then spending 6 years at a university before you get tenure. I hate the lack of geographic control and ridiculous lifestyle of academia. When are you supposed to sleep? Why do we glorify working ourselves to death? Maybe I'm just French and happened to be born on the wrong continent.
I love working with the people with mild cognitive impairment/ Alzheimer's. I like doing clinical assessments and neuropsychological testing. I love it when they open up to me and tell me what is going on in their lives. I realize I need a career that provides me with satisfaction. (And I can't get no satisfaction from academia.)
If I make a short list of the things that I have done (jobs/volunteering) that have made me really happy in my life, my thesis is definitely not on that list. I would say that list is composed of the following:
-teaching in the Dominican Republic
-teaching in India
-volunteering at a domestic abuse shelter in high school with kids
-working with the patients here at the hospital
-tutoring the low SES children through the Educational Tutorial Services program
-tutoring the high school students at Kaplan
(It is true that I hated what Kaplan stood for and I hated the idea of buying a better score. However, I really liked helping people improve their future and become more successful. My first tutoring student raised her score 250 points!)
All of these career path thoughts have led me to some interesting conclusions. First and foremost, I have learned that it is best to walk a path only if you like where it is heading, not if it is enjoyable for now. For example, if I am surrounded by people who are professors and I would hate their lifestyle, perhaps I had better not go to a research/academia-oriented program. It is true you can make any career as stressful as you want, but if most people are doing things that I find to be miserable, it is probably not something I want to do.
I find the same thing to be true for socializing. I hate going to the big college-scene bars in Chapel Hill by UNC. No thank you, I do not like chugging cheap swill with boys in ripped jeans, polo shirts, and baseball hats. I do not like being unable to converse with the people next to me and packed like sardines. If I know most of the bar/ poolhall scene around there is like that, I shouldn't assume it will be different the next time.
(On an unrelated note, I hate the way the boys touch the girls at the bars like they own them. I would totally slap a boy if he touched me the way some of them have touched a co-worker of mine. Even if I am not in the same weight class as them, unlike at New College.)