Month: June 2004

I’m going to blame my term paper for keeping me away from blogging. I wish I could but the truth is that I haven’t been that faithful at blogging recently for a variety of reasons. One reason was that I got tired of writing about waffling back and forth about my graduate degree. The good news is that a little more than a week ago, I made a decision! I’m going to do the master’s instead of Ph.D. My advisor had told me that if I didn’t want to go into academia there was probably no reason to torture myself with a Ph.D. I have been certain for quite a while that I did not want to be an academic. My fear is that unemployed Ph.D.’s will be competing for the master’s level jobs I want as a biologist with various government agencies. However, I have something they don’t: work experience and permanent status with the federal government since I put in ten hard years as a firefighter with the National Park Service. Now I have to convince people that I can be a biologist. Hopefully the master’s degree will be convincing enough. Oh yes, and we get to move up to WeWA (western Washington) next year! My husband is finally very excited about the prospect, which makes the idea of moving much better of course.

Another reason I haven’t posted in a while is that one of my favorite blog topics (riding lessons) has become rather routine. I’m fine-tuning technical skills and can’t imagine anyone would want to read about that. Actually I don’t even really want to write about that. I still don’t have my own horse. I’m still riding Goldie, who limps a little sometimes and other times not. Has my life become boring? Of course not! Last night I took a riding lesson from a spunky lady who is an eventer, which means that she rides her horses over jumps on a cross country course (outside of the arena), as well as does show jumping and dressage. My goal is to get out of the arena. It’s hard to think of yet more arena exercises for Goldie and me. Doesn’t galloping over hill and dale sound like more fun? I think Goldie would think so too. I have, however, learned that the position of the rider is different for eventers. More like the position I learned and didn’t do well in before I started riding with my wonderful hunter trainer. So it looks like galloping cross country and breezing over solid obstacles is not going to happen for a while. I need to get comfortable in what feels like an unstable perched position. I’m not even comfortable going over little cross-rails yet. I have a whole year to learn this before we move and I have to find another trainer.

I gave the scary presetation that I mentioned in this post. Afterward I didn’t have the sense of relief that it was over. Instead I experienced more of a “buyer’s remorse” type feeling. I decided that I’m just not good at this graduate school business and that perhaps going for the master’s is going to be good enough.

Then I started working on my term paper and got incredibly excited by the topic. So excited in fact that I went to campus on Memorial Day and worked on it for 10 hours. Then I couldn’t calm down and suffered anxiety most of the night. Fortunately today I had to wait for the plumber to snake out the drain from our washing machine. I worked on my paper at a much more sane pace and still got a fair amount done. I have a good idea of where this paper is going.

Of course, I’m waffling back to “well, maybe I’m not so awful at this grad school stuff after all.” I don’t know that that is true but I’m still intensely interested in the subject. Also, I thought a great deal about Fran’s comment about fear. I thought that perhaps I was letting fear keep me from enjoying graduate school. The truth is, I am not a fearful person. Heck, I fought forest fires for 10 years! I ride jumping horses! I am actually very good at facing my fears and getting beyond fear. Consequently I have accomplished a number of interesting things in my life. Perhaps I for the first time in my life I have to face that just because I’m intensely interested in something, it doesn’t mean that I have a knack for it. Sometimes accomplishing something takes more than hard work. Sometimes skill is involved.

I’ve applied for two fisheries research jobs with NOAA up in Seattle. I’m interested to see if my past and new skills are anything useful to them.