Back to School...and Work!

Months have gone by since I swore up and down that I was moving on from Otis and not going to finish my MFA. Well, over the summer I spent my time job searching and interviewing for the few jobs out there. It was scary times, and while I got real close to a few jobs, it was a lot of rejection.

It was down to a week away from when school would have been starting for me, and I had just had an awesome interview with a really cool arts education non-profit in Pasadena. I had pulled out all the stops for this interview and felt really good about it. After a couple of days without hearing back, I started feeling bad about leaving another program, and felt like I just wanted this degree for what ever reason, that I couldn't explain or quantify.

I talked to my program director and somehow had convinced her into giving me more scholarship money and accepting all of my transfer credits. That means I would only need to take 4 more classes to finish this degree. Finally I heard from the job that they had hired someone else, someone that had just graduated from my program. This really made the decision for me, and with the new deal I had worked out with the school, I was going back, just like that. Months worth of stress and laboring over decisions, how to make decisions and utter denial was all resolved in 3 days. Sometimes time fixes things.

In going back to school, I was able to convince this non-profit, to create a position for me, and hire me on part-time. They would partially be paying me through my work-study. So going back to school actually gave me a job. At least I won't risk spending a year job searching and can finish this degree--part-time at that!

I am also still planning to apply to 2 graduate programs this year for the following year. One is in Urban Planning, and could be finished part-time while I start working. The other is a full-time program in Public Health. I realized that no one job path/degree is going to give me what I'm looking for. So the plan is that I will do both. Create a professional option where I can make money in an ethically responsible way and fund my own artwork.

This is of course only the plan for now, and I am open to new opportunities and change, so only time will tell, but I'm looking forward and enjoying the present.