First Day of School, er, New Job

I am finishing up my final days at my current job. The beginning of the week will filled with good-bye lunches, cards, and gifts, but now I am the only staff person in the office for the remainder of the week. It's certainly an anticlimatic way of ending this job, but it's also given me time to think about my next position and what I want to do differently. Here is a list of my hopes and aspirations in formation.

1. I hope that I like my new job.
2. I hope that I fit in with my new coworkers.
3. I hope that I can regain my enthusaism, passion, commitment, and perservance. Basically, I want to live up to my potential again.

Here is a list of what I do not want to do.

1. I will not complain about being a junior level person.
   
2. I will not get worried about having a much smaller salary.

Most of all I am just plain excited. I wish I had a few days to transition between the two places, but having a job is reason enough to be plenty thankful.

Yay

I have a new job. And SCL and I just came back from the most amazing vacation.

Life is good. Really good.

The Woes of "Hurry Up and Wait"

It's now almost 2:00 on Wednesday--exactly one week since my interview in DC. I really could not have asked for it to have gone better. By the end, the employer was impressed with my skills, my experience, and the fact that I had done my homework on their organization. She said they would make a decision by the end of this week, but I had hoped that it would be sooner.

In the meantime, I have been debating in my head whether or not I will get an offer. On the one hand, I am overqualified and more than experienced in the field. But what if they didn't like me as well as I thought? What if they want someone with less experience, more junior than me? I'm having thoughts like, "I will be devastated if I don't get it." But, really, what if I don't? I've taken time off from the exhausting process of applying, which has contributed to a "putting my eggs in one basket" way of being as I wait to hear.

I hope and pray to hear sometime tomorrow before SCL and I leave for vacation (!!!) on Friday and I will be totally unreachable. When planning the trip, that sounded like a fabulous idea, but now it seems more inconvenient than anything.

Work is No Utopia

There are things about student life I miss. I miss the community, the built-in social network. I miss having very few of my hours each day scheduled and the autonomy to make my day look however I wanted. I miss going to the gym at 8:30 in the morning or at 2:00 in the afternoon or at 9:00 at night.

Really it's timing that poses the most challenges for an academic/non-academic couple. There are mornings when I would rather have a lazy breakfast with SCL, but instead I'm out the door by 7:45 to get to the train station. I don't get home until 6:15 in the evening. That is a solid 10.5 hour block of time when I'm not available to hang out with SCL or, you know, go to the grocery store or bank. I have to give SCL his props: he accommodates my schedule a lot of the time, doing the bulk of his work during the day. Occasionally he works at night when a big paper's due, but it's the exception. This isn't a self-sacrificial thing really; he's just like me--more productive in the daytime. This works well for us, and I hope it continues similarly when he begins the PhD.

I hope that my next job requires less commute, which would mean more a.m and p.m. hours. My even greater hope is that my next job allows for a lunch break so that SCL and I could occasionally meet for lunch. Imagine that!