My Future’s So Dim, I Come Equipped with a Flashlight

I’ve been too busy to post lately, and posting now means blowing off homework, but I don’t care. Writing for myself in some capacity is a necessary component of my mental well-being, so it’s truly an investment in my future to blog. That’s what I’m telling myself.

Graduate school is not quite as I had imagined it. Yes, we are reading some wonderful (and some infuriating) things but neither has fostered in me a passion for education as I had imagined. I am finding myself misplaced and Midwestern othered here where everyone dreams of staying in higher education forever, living in big cities, and being important. I want none of those things. My updated dream is vague and has no real name, but I know that I want to help people, specifically women or the disabled community. Great. I’m liberal and in my twenties. I’m really special.

I find myself avoiding reading assignments by searching for jobs nearer to home where I can put my skills and passions to work, but I don’t even know where to begin. If I’ve learned anything thus far, its about the futility of education. My MA in English is not a job ticket, it’s a ticket to compete (thanks James Berlin. This nugget really cheered me up.) Unfortunately, I don’t know where to start, in what arenas I should be competing or where I want to apply. I know that an adjunct teaching position without benefits is probably my best bet, but upon graduation I won’t even be a strong candidate for that sort of position.

The internet is full of whiny graduates waxing poetic over their awful lives after getting a MA in the Humanities. The Google search “What can you do with a MA in English” yields about 430,000,000 results, most of which are pathetic rambling blog posts like this one, the rest being overly positive college websites reciting the same old spiel about how diverse the fields are for English graduates, from copy editing, working in publications, to (you guessed it) teaching. Very diverse indeed.

I find myself speaking on behalf of practicality in class, a position I’ve never occupied before. Maybe I’m tired of the same old ideas never being put into practice or the starry-eyed enthusiasm students of the humanities have for change. I believe that change can occur, I just doubt it will originate in the Composition classroom. No matter how political you make your lesson plans or inappropriately you demonstrate ideology in the classroom, you’ve only sparked thought, not change. Few students will even change from their privileged and ignorant ways after taking ENGL 101 . . .  I mean, it’s a required course taken by liberals and conservatives alike. No one cares about it or expects a life-changing experience from it. I want to work where progress occurs, not where it maybe possibly has the potential to start.

This will probably result in me volunteering while maintaining an office job, but who knows. Anyone have any resources or suggestions?