Lessons learnt in Reality

I keep meaning to post things (really, I have posts all lined up in my head!). But the Real World is unexpectedly more time-consuming, or possibly more energy-consuming, than you’d think.

Here, though, are some useful things I’m learning, courtesy of the Real World, which I don’t think I’d have learnt so swiftly if I’d not taken time out:

* Moving does not have to be a major stressor for me. Now, I always knew that, but my last major move in life, moving to uni, was extremely stressful. Moving cities has been great: I love Canberra, I love living in a real flat. I miss my friends but I’m not homesick. I’ve discovered that I’m a whole lot more confident than I was in first year, that I can make friends easily, and also elect not to make friends with people if we don’t connect easily. This really isn’t a surprising life development, but it’s nice to know that before I try uprooting myself and trotting off to the other side of the globe.

* Set work hours! My god, they’re fascinating. I’d never realised how long nine hours was – nine hours on your feet waitressing is long, but you don’t finish a shift with tangible progress to pick up the next day. You can get an awful lot of stuff done between the hours of 8.30 and 5.30 every day. You can also waste an awful lot of time, if you’re so inclined.

I suspect I spent most of my degree wasting an awful lot of time. I did quite a bit of work, too, but I had this awful ‘just start work and keep going until bedtime’ mentality. I’d be blogging, surfing, emailing, and who knows what else at the same time, all day, every day. Now, I’m finding that once I get home from work I don’t have time to keep up with the internet, which is a sure sign that I had over-committed myself online…

Do we think that if I spend two years working in the Real World, I might get into the habit of working by day and blogging by night?

* Stress happens in the Real World, too. But it’s not the end of the world. Right now, for example, my team is completely crunched: major project, already extended deadlines by about a month, and there is absolutely no way the final product is going to be as shiny and professional as we would like it.

We deal. In this case, it means getting the parts which draw the most public attention as shiny as possible, and as much of the rest of it functional if possible. I have my own little sandbox, which I thought would take me a week and has taken me nearly a month already. I’m going to try to have it finished in the next two working days. I might even put in some hours over the long weekend. But if I don’t get it done… the world does not end.

Stress is happening. I want to go into Deadline Mode (stopping only sleep, eating while working, and compulsively checking Livejournal every five minutes).  But even if I did, this is a teamwork project, and I’m the tiniest cog in the team machine. I’ve worked in teams before and I’ve worked on projects with deadlines before, but I’ve never done both at once. It’s at once incredibly frustrating and incredibly comforting. This thing lives or dies on a communal effort, and its success or failure doesn’t change my net worth as a human being, or my standing in the workplace.

Academia is a bit (a lot) more personal than that, but I shall endeavour to learn perspective.

* I went to a project management workshop the other day: a whole bunch of stuff about defining objectives, scope, processes, what have you. Dry as toast but very useful. It hit me, while we were working through this pre-designed Project Management Scheme, that this was what I’d struggled and fumbled about with at the beginning of last year: the fact that I couldn’t just pick up a book, open a document and start Thesising. I had to figure out some idea of what I wanted, where I was going, and how to get there, and I didn’t have a set framework for doing that. Now, the Enormous Project I’m involved in at the moment goes to show that no matter how carefully you Manage, it will still come down to a frantic scramble at the end. However, I can see how careful management, a clear idea of the objectives, scope, and resources, and knowing what gives and what doesn’t, is what’s keeping it all from flying to pieces before my bossess’ eyes.

Academic work projects. Rather more time consuming, ego-crushing, absorb-your-whole-life than most workplace projects, but still projects. Here’s hoping a few years in the workforce teaches me a bit about project management.

That was rather a lot of blather. Congratulations if you got to the end of it

The Naked Philologist Considers Other Careers

I know, terrible prospect, that. But the fact is, I am at present more or less unemployable in the Real World, while at the same time there’s a couple of degrees between me and even the chance of an academic job. Overseas degrees. Expensive overseas degrees. And one has to *live* as well as study.

I’m telling myself that I need a secondary career- maybe even a separate qualification- so that I can hope to earn some kind of money between degrees. So that I have something to fall back on when there are simply no academic jobs going. That sort of thing.

When I mention this plan to Wise Academics, they look at me with solemn eyes and say to me ‘once you’re in the real world, it’s hard to leave’. They remind me that once one is earning money, it’s very hard to throw that in for another three to five years of study. They absolutely balk at the idea that I might take *another* degree in order to gain employment, the purpose of which is supposedly to earn me money to take further degrees in Medieval Studies…

I was thinking of TESL. Teaching training, I figure, can hardly go astray for a prospective academic. Language teaching training doubly so, for a prospective Anglo-Saxonist. And I’m told by people who work in the TESL industry that it’s primarily part time, and no one can stand to do it for a permanent career. So it sounds like a nice, transportable secondary career that probably won’t suck me into it completely.

Recently, though, I’ve wound up as the student supervisor of the College library. And I’m reminded of one of the rough plans I had when I came to USyd in the first place: a Bachelor of Arts followed by a Dip Lib.

I like libraries. I like books. I like books covered and catalogued and put in order. As a child, I not only covered and alphabetised the contents of my bookshelf, I stuck little white stickers with handmade ‘F- MON’ style library tags on all of them. A book is not truly a book until it is catalogued and shelved. I really do like the Dewey Decimal system. I thought I just appreciated its usefulness, until, in the course of correcting cataloguing errors, I discovered that the other student librarians, who have all been at uni for years, have failed to internalise the broad Dewey categories. To me, it is not merely a nuisance to find a work of literature mis-catalogued in the 500s, but a Gross Disturbance In The Order Of Things. I have had to conclude that I am abnormally emotionally attached to the Dewey Decimal System.¹

Accordingly, I am thinking that I would enjoy training and working as a Librarian. I know I would. But is librarian-ing a useful skill for a medievalist? Would PHD scholarship people look at an application and thing ’sweet, a librarian, we need more of those in medieval studies’? Would an employer look at a job application and think ‘neat! An academic with information management skills’?

Whaddya reckon, internets?

~

1. And I have library-fu. I can tell the difference between 829.91 and 829.9 1, and between S829 91 and 829.9 S1. (Apparently this is so difficult that the Library has had to make a computer game to teach people. Me, I just hung out up there for far too long. Eventually, after swearing a lot and walking in circles a lot, I got the idea. It seems not everyone does.) The other day, I unearthed a book which was catalogued simply as 942. Have you any idea how many 942s there are on the ninth floor of Fisher? Everything from 942 ABC to 942 ZYX, and hiding somewhere in there, one 942-nothing. Which turned out to be under the initial of the dedicatee, not the author. Fortunately, I was possessed by Library!Ninja-power that day…

Suggestions, anyone?

At college formal dinner tonight, I discovered that one of my new postgrad friends has recently been awarded the Queensland Fulbright Scholarship to study in the States next semester. She suggested that, in my process of Applying-For-Everything-Under-The-Sun over the next nine months or so, I ought to have a stab at a Fulbright, and a) offered to help me with applications and b) told me that the College’s Honorary Librarian, whom I conveniently know through working for the college library, is on NSW Fulbright committee or panel or whoever they are.

Since I do honestly intend to apply for everything under the sun, and I hadn’t thought about US study before, I’m asking for suggestions. If I wanted to do a one-year Masters program in either Anglo-Saxon studies or interdisciplinary Medieval Studies, where should I apply?
Furthermore- are international students able to take student loans in the States? (Obviously I’d try to secure further funding to cover fees, but it’s worth finding these things out…)

And does anyone know of a way to sell Medieval Studies as relevant and useful and liable to enrich relations between the US and Australia?