Calling

I’ve been in school for almost as long as I can remember. The answer to the question, “What do you do?” has always been “I’m a student.” For me, this graduation will be different from all the others: I will graduate without plans to go to school next year. As a grad student I’ve been so used to saying “I hope to graduate in ____” that I have a hard time even understanding what it means to actually be done. A little formatting and a few forms, and all the requirements will be fulfilled. And then what? What’s next?

Back in Spring of 2010—the last time I was teaching—I was certain that education was my calling. I knew that I wanted to work toward making the world a better place, and I was certain that teaching courses like Ethics and Social and Political Philosophy was the way to go about doing that. I helped students to reflect on what it means to be in the world with others, and at a time in their lives when they were likely to be questioning some of the things that they had always assumed to be true. If I could awaken just a few students each semester to the reflective life, open a few students’ eyes to the ways their actions impact those around them, I’d be making a difference. More recently I’ve started to question my belief that this is necessarily the best use of my talents. In some ways I’ve always wondered if teaching were really my best option for working toward a better world, but being a teacher and experiencing how much I really enjoyed interacting with students and exchanging ideas, I pushed other options out of my head: if I could do good in the world while doing what I enjoyed, why look for other possibilities? Having been away from teaching for a year now, and having had my first unproductive swing at the academic job market, I’m considering other options. Also, writing a dissertation on the nature of our responsibility to the severely impoverished will make one wonder if one could be doing more to fulfill those obligations.

Certainly, teaching is still something I’d love to do, but I quite suspect that there is other meaningful work out there that would use my abilities and allow me to work toward a more just world. Lots of organizations have goals of alleviating poverty, meeting people’s basic needs, giving people opportunities to improve their lives, or something similar. I’ve learned to research, write, proofread, and edit; I’ve learned to be self-motivated and to set boundaries and good habits to manage my own time; I’ve honed my problem-solving and critical reasoning skills. Surely I can use this know-how to work for the greater good. More specifically, however, I have no idea what sort of job all of that might translate into.

So far I feel like this post isn’t saying a whole lot. I guess I’m just finding myself in a very unfamiliar place. On the one hand I have a passion for social justice and feel called to work toward making the world around me a better place, and on the other hand I have no concrete ideas about how exactly to do this. It’s job search time, and hopefully I’ll find something inspiring.