I am a profoundly future-oriented person. I obsess over it, I plan incessantly. I’ve made it through the first eighth of my two year commitment, so it’s feels very urgent that I work out what comes next.
For some time, I was seriously considering going to seminary after TFA. That, or continuing to teach and getting a Master’s in Education.
Right now, I don’t think I’m particularly interested in either of those options. Seminary has lost a lot of appeal because I’m not currently in an environment where the kind of religion that I’m into is the norm – I’m all about quiet, contemplative, in-the-woods faith, and I feel like everyone here goes to church and there’s this idea that faith is a group activity rather than a deeply personal connection between you and something larger than you. At this point, a quarter of the year into my first year of teaching, I’m not sure that I see myself teaching in the long term either. Maybe that will change after a while, but right now, I don’t see myself teaching after TFA.
More recently, I’ve considered going to get a Master’s in Information Science, which is similar to Library Science but geared more toward the private sector. It’s about how to organize and categorize information, and about making information accessible to the people who need it. It’s helpful to people, but in an abstract, hands-off kind of way.
I’ve also thought, now and then, of going to grad school for my Masters in Communication, but I’m not sure if that’s right for me. I love the idea of it, of course, just immersing myself in communication theory for two years. However, I’m not sure that I’m interested in working in the field.
Of course, I could just kind of wing it – wait until TFA ends and then just find whatever job I can. This option terrifies me, it’s the option of throwing caution to the wind and just doing something, anything. I’m convinced that this is how people lead mediocre, boring lives where they end up with some kind of horrible office job that they work at for all of eternity. Still, there’s an argument that I might be fine taking this route – work whatever kind of job I can find for a year or so, and see what that might lead to, going to grad school if that’s what I need to do. That’s the laid back approach to life, I think, and at this point, it’s looking pretty appealing.
Maybe it’s being out of college, maybe it’s being in Mississippi, but I feel like I’m much less obsessively ambitious than I once was. In college, I was always asking myself “What am I doing that will get me where I want to be in the future?” and sometimes, now, I’m fine with not doing anything that’s working toward the future.