I have been thinking about my future a lot lately. I will soon come to the end of my PhD and that is as far as I had ever planned. I seem to have been following a plan, until now. I suppose I just assumed that I would love my PhD excel at it and continue on in Physics, but I decided against that months ago. I made the decision when I was pregnant though and when I returned to work I started to enjoy what I was doing again, and started looking for post-doc positions, but I am just not sure. When I think about what I do now, and consider continuing with it, but without the freedoms I have as a student, the thought is unbearable. I don't want to commute into an office everyday and share my space with uninspiring people. I don't want to be away from my family for most of the day, seeing them only for a few hours each evening , if at all. I don't want to travel all over the world, spending days or weeks away at a time. I don't want all my time accounted for so that I have no time to read and write, and experience things other than work. Most worryingly of all I don't want to do the work I have been doing in my PhD, I have not found it fulfilling enough to overide all the other problems.
I'm still trying to understand this, I still get a thrill when I learn new physics, when I go to talks and read books and research papers, but my day to day work, even the more exciting parts, I just can not be interested enough to want to spend anymore time doing it.
This blog has told me something too, I expected it to lean more towards physics and less towards my family, but it leans the other way, does that tell me where my interest lies at the moment?
So I need to think of something that I am interested in, that fits in well with family life and, hopefully, has something to do with physics. I have joined prospects and other career websites and I recently went to a recruitment fair. It was awful, truly, truly horrible, the people were all carbon copies of each other, speaking commitee speak, all trying to show they have the same 'skills set' of leadership, team playing blah blah, Oh my god how could I ever think that I could have anything to do with that world. The only people who didn't speak like that were the teachers, so we spent a long time at the teaching stand and I think we will do some taster sessions, both of us, my partner and I.
Then yesterday morning I woke up thinking that I couldn't do it. I was so promising as a physicist, and I still love it surely somewhere there is something I can do?
I need to check the Aber Uni website, I just can't make this decision, it is so hard. Maybe I need to speak to somebody, but who?
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