Lobster in a Bucket

Course Changes

Well many of you guys have heard me wax long and long about my grand plans to go to graduate school at Penn and study under Bruce Kucklick. Well this Summer I read a lot of litereature, and went to a lot of flea markets and antique stores. I also bought a lot of vinyl. And through all that, somewhere along the line I decided that grad school wasn't meant to happen next year.

So what is in store for me next year? Well that question has been bothering me for a bit. Things like my looming RA-ship and SIP uncertainties helped distract me from having to think about it. But then I came to a point somewhere last week where I felt the need to start moving in some new direction.

I still want to go to grad school, just not next year. This is for a number of reasons.

1) I don't feel ready to enter the world of graduate study, in terms of time commitment (at least 5 years), emotional maturity, and intellectual adulthood.

2) These reasons are kind of subjective and nebulous and could all be overcome with enough self-flaggelation (sp?). But perhaps more importantly, I don't feel strongly pulled towards any one field of history. Until I get a sense of that somehow, I just can't see myself committing to a grad school and professor.

Well I kind of talked to my parents about all this last Saturday, they were find with that decision, but did want to know what I wanted to do instead. I told them that I wanted to teach, maybe in a foreign country. My parents with an amazing degree of quickness, suggested Uganda. In Uganda there are these early teenage boys out in the bush that need a tutor.

I am afraid of Uganda. My dad has been there twice on business for World Harvest Missions, and each time that he got back, I would sit at his knee and hear about horrible diseases and parasites that infest that land. Needless to say, this didn't sit well with my timid pre-pubescent self.

So when I have romantically dreamt of teaching MK's it has always been in more pastoral settings. Nice happy, clean, wired places like Black Forest Academy in Germany, not the bush of Uganda.

But I really feel led towards Uganda, like God is pulling on a heart string or somethin. Well the process has already been begun with World Harvest, so will see where things go.

Posted by matt at September 18, 2003 12:26 AM | TrackBack