Back to school: Thoughts about my academic future

I don't know how I feel about this year. Way more uncertainty than last. With this being a (traditionally) two year M.S. program I'm in, this is the year where I'm expected to make a lot of decisions. As in, whether or not I'm going to take a break, or plunge ahead into a PhD program, or even take my higher education in another direction.

At the immediate moment, I don't feel I'm ready for a PhD program, be it in this current program, or in sociology.  My program is however, a bit too disciplinary to be taken into consideration when teaching sociology at the community college level.  I'll try and convince people otherwise and see if I can try and teach with my M.S. in hand.

If not an PhD, then what? An MSW was what I was thinking, for more practical, community research-based purposes. I would like to specialize in the type of qualitative research that is non-oppressive, non-intrusive, post (or de) colonial in nature, and does more than gets an academic published in a journal of sorts.  I genuinely want to have the benefits lie on behalf of the people moreso than myself. Ask me again next year about this.

I was also thinking a spanish immersion/proficiency program. Taking a year (or summer) to do that would be great in general.

Then there's just working/researching for a non-profit, community based organization full-time and honing either my DJing, comic book drawing, gardening or urban survival skills on the side.

Yes, I am aware of how unprepared I am should disaster strike, especially being that I'm low-income in class status with rising student loan debt (ask me about this when I get my PhD). I've decided this summer that I want to be more useful to society in general, as these book-smarts aren't going to keep me fed if institutional structures crumble and the world turns to chaos.  So yeah. That's on my mind, too, learning practical/survival skills so I can be of use to people outside of the researcher/educational sense.

I just have to be confident that I'll be able to live off a meager income AND whittle away my loans (if I do take a year off outside of grad school, that is) enough to do more exploring, comprehension and less rigorous mental labor.

Thanks for reading my thoughts. Feedback is appreciated, however school starts tomorrow, so I apologize in advance if I don't get back to you quickly.

Future Plans

The following is a collection of thoughts about this coming school year and future goals in/out-of academia.

• I would like to teach, or gain experience teaching. And community colleges claim that you need a minimum of a masters degree in order to teach at their level. So, if I'm able to, maybe I'll apply to one of these colleges and see if my interdisciplinary degree will be useful in this capacity. Although I did talk to my department director, who was very pessimistic of my chances, as I have had no (formal) teaching experience. 

• In continuing my education (and attempting to get residency in Arizona),  I was thinking of doing not one, but two certificate programs. One in Socio-economic justice, and the other in Grant-writing, if they're still available. Otherwise, I wonder if it would be a good (read: more practical) idea to get an MSW, as I hope to do more work with community-based non-profit organizations. 

• I feel I still owe my allegiance to sociology in that I would get a PhD in Sociology for teaching purposes. However, doing Public Sociology seems to gel better with me, as I want to do social research, but not the type of research that is so steeped in academese that I detach myself (semi-permenantly) from the communities in which such writing and research papers are intended to serve. So far, the only program I came across was a masters program at American University.

• Which leads me to wonder, how many masters degrees is too much en route to getting a PhD, more debt notwithstanding?

• And speaking of debt, I wonder if taking a break to go after non-academic endeavors is worth anything? Another avenue to go down is taking a break to teach or work at a non-profit (while whittling away on my student loan debt), while pursuing other endeavors. Like learning to 
• garden in various environments
• survive in an urban environment
• become an effective foster parent
• use updated video editing equipment, become a video editor
• create comic books and/or zines with a comic-book format
• be a better DJ
• love in every sense of the word (the most important for my personal self growth)

• If I were to continue my education elsewhere, I would like to accomplish the following goals while indebting myself further:
• be a proficient Spanish speaker (another colonizer's language, I know).
• being well versed in post-colonial or de-colonized and womanist rhetoric enough to know what 'smashing the white supremacist, racist, homophobic, patriarchal paradigm' means.
• confidence in explaining intersectionality and my idea of oppositional love and social in/justice.
• confidence in doing non-oppressive action-based social research and doing it well.
• Doing an alternative dissertation that involves either film, comics or some sort of art-form as opposed to a ridiculously long paper. 

So, if anyone has any resources with regards to programs that may help set my (academic) mind at ease, it would be greatly appreciated. Thanks for taking the time to read.

Hidden Curriculum in Academic Departments

Maybe this is more of a vent than a thought or observation.

The story begins when I show up at the office I share w/other M.S. students to find a Ph.D. student settling in; rearranging desks and so on like it's nobody's business. Enter office/room key-master, stating "surprise! You no longer have an office! Didn't you get an email?" (essentially).  Of course I didn't, and I told him so.  He then told me that, since I was actively using the space I'm being kicked out of, that I would need to move else where.

Long story short, I notified the others (surprise!), and saw floor plans indicating that all graders (masters-level students with little-no funding are to work on the bottom floor. In cubicles, not a shared office. And have them tell it, us masters students were lucky to have an office at all, since we're not technically funded (we're only paid as if it were a regular-paying job).

Now, here's where the  rant begins.  In a program and (former) department where social justice seems to be one of the main foci/staple (making them famous among academic peers, so I've been told), it sure does seem like the layout and treatment of students is hierarchical.  I initially thought the school was innovate in treating M.S. students as pseudo-equals with the office spaces, intermingling with PhD students.  Now it seems that someone is reinforcing the hierarchy and sending out the message that M.S. students are indeed at the bottom, and hardly worthy of much of anything, shown by the office-space type layout in which we now inhabit as less-than-T.A's.

I dunno, for some reason, I find this to be an injustice, researching and 'resisting' existing institutional power structures, yet re-enforcing them within the departmental walls.  Hypocrisy is more like it. Way to rebel against those institutional hierarchies and oppressive structures. Way to stratify and isolate MS and PHD students (well, the PhD students are in more of a cohabitative setting).

I'll make edits to this later. For now, though, this sucks monkey-butt.