Life Goals

In a junior high Family and Consumer Science class, we were each given a piece of paper with questions dealing with what we would like to do when we grew up. We were supposed to think about what we saw ourselves doing in the future.

I sat there and sat there, and I couldn't see myself doing anything. Well, other than watering the flowers outside of my cottage as I walked around in sandals and a sundress. That's what I saw in my head. So I wrote that down. I don't remember the teacher's comments when she saw that my life goal was to own an English-style cottage with sloping roofs and ivy up the side and to water my plants and sit and read in the sunshine. Doctor? Teacher? No, it didn't llamarme la atención.

Currently I am not doing that. I'm pursuing a graduate degree and working as a research assistant. And often I feel a little lost, like I'm a little minnow trying to swim upstream with a bunch of muscled salmon. That sounds a lot lost. Okay, maybe like a little kid trying to use the big words and use the same gestures as the big kids, trying to fake my way through until hopefully I actually do start to get it, do understand, can make my own sociological analyses and feel confident about them. Right now I think I'm just pretending.

Recently I took a personality test through the Enneagram Institute, and I turned out a 9, a peacemaker. Several of the graduate students I've talked to are 4s and 5s - Individualists and Investigators. I haven't met anyone else who identifies as a Peacemaker; easy-going, receptive, complacent. These make me wonder if maybe I am lost; maybe my personality doesn't prepare me to be a world-class sociological researcher.

Then why am I here?

When I took my first sociology class as an undergraduate student, it opened my eyes. I learned so much. I started thinking about my assumptions and prejudices. It changed me. I think it made me a better person. I continued with sociology, planning on doing social work. After an internship where I realized that it was mostly paperwork and a lot of redtape and dealing with unhappy children and unhappy parents, I thought maybe I could try something else. A lot of my professors, and friends, had been mentioning graduate school for a while. I started to take them seriously. I'm smart. I'm doing well as an undergraduate. Maybe I could be a professor and help students view the world in a different way as I had been helped. I read Mark Noll's The Scandal of the Evangelical Mind and felt excited by his encouragement in the value and validity of Christians working in higher education. I wanted to be part of that.

So here I am, halfway through my first semester. I have research projects that I keep sludging along with. I have three papers staring at me like a mountain in the Black Hills and I have my little MacBook of a pickaxe as I try to create Crazy Horse. But I'm also working as a teacher's assistant in an introductory sociology class, and I like that a lot. I was able to lecture on a couple of topics. I've had one-on-one interactions with some of the students, explaining on a personal level the nuances of a particular sociological concept. I like that.

We'll see where I end up. For the time being I will continue chiseling away at my future publishable papers, thinking about how my life experiences and my individual personality meet up.