What Do You Want to Be When You Grow Up

My career has taken enough turns, half-starts and not-well-thought-out decisions that I’m always just glad to have a “real job.” My timing, typically, has been poor, as exemplified by the fact that I am currently purusing an MPA with an emphsis in local government management while working in the marketing department of a university.

This situation resulted from the fact that I quit one job to move to a different city with zero plan about what to do once I got there. The smart move would have been to start grad school then. I hadn’t been able to find a full-time job, I wasn’t super in love with my current career, perfect moment to dedicate my energies to making a shift.

I couldn’t see it that way then, though. I had managed to make it through undergrad with zero debt and — after years of hearing friends complain about their respective debt loads — felt loath to yoke myself to years of monthly payments. It just didn’t seem necessary at the time, either. Now, I would tell just about anyone I know who is currently an undergrad to make plans for getting their master’s.

Point being, I spent about a year and half dicking around in the service industry before the difficulty of finding a job in my current profession (journalism) while staying in the same city (St. Louis) truly suck in. I needed to go back to school. I flirted with the idea of an MFA in creative writing before settling on something a little more practical. I enrolled got ready to start in the fall and then promptly landed a full-time job working for the ill-fated Patch.com. (Fun fact: I am legally not entitled to tell you much about that experience — a freedom sacrificed for about $2,000 in extra severance pay).

I’ve been balancing the full-time job grad school bit since then. The workload isn’t really the problem. The problem is that a lot of the people I’ve seen be successful in finding jobs have either A) the freedom to take a serious of unpaid or low paying internships until something sticks or B) the freedom to move across the country to Small Town, USA. I’m not really in the position to do either.

But what I really wanted to get at today and have rambled long to do so is that the deeper problem is that I’m not exactly sure what I’m interested in. By this, I mean that in grad school, a common question is posed thus: “What are you interested in?” For people in the local gov biz, the answer is usually “Community and economic development” or “finding new ways to fund infrastructure projects” or “human resource challenges.” You see this in other industries as well, of course. People pick a subject area in their field and then build a personal brand around having some kind of expertise.

I’ve struggled to answer that question, to find that thing that i can pursue that will set me apart or motivate me to set myself apart. If I want to make a career in the local government/public policy sector, it’s a decision I am going to need to make. Really, what I should be doing is combining my journalism background with that interest and blogging about local government issues. Hard work, though, and I just ultimately don’t think my opinions are interesting or insightful enough to gain the kind of “hot take” traction necessary.

— Day 4 —