Sweet Lord. I am terrible at updating this blog. Getting myself to update on merely a weekly basis is (much like getting myself to make any kind of research progress on a weekly basis) akin to pulling teeth. (Prospective employers can just skip over that part… I’m a hard worker, I swear I am! But it’s a lot easier when I’m motivated.)
So that’s what I’m going to ramble about… because lack of motivation is definitely the number one thing slowing me down and making me feel like an unproductive loaf most weeks. Tonight I was talking to my boyfriend, who always tells me to “stay in school!” because he has a real job and thinks they compare unfavorably to student life, and he was saying how he feels like he never DOES anything that’s legitimately PRODUCTIVE at work, just spends too much time filling out paperwork and doing similarly unsatisfying tasks.
Well, that’s pretty much how I feel about being in school most days. When I spend a good portion of my day reading papers on the history of the Klamath Mountains or running models with varying thermal parameters, I don’t really feel like I’m doing anything useful. I just don’t find research that fulfilling. I crave the kind of work where I can complete a project and hand it to someone and they’ll say, “Awesome, thanks! I really needed you to do that. Now I can run my company efficiently/write useful legislation/blah blah insert societally relevant task here.” (Or maybe they’re an ungrateful prick and they won’t say that, but I’ll know they’re thinking it, deep down.)
So, yeah, I need to find a job where I can do that, and in the mean time come up with some kind of motivation to keep me going on a daily basis. I’m pretty excited to have a TA assignment this semester where I get to actually teach labs again, because at least most of the time I can finish a lab and feel like, hey, some of those students learned something about geology today… that’s useful. And as my friend Travis was saying about teaching, in a way you’re much more motivated to work on teaching-related tasks than your own work, because you feel so responsible for someone else’s success. I don’t think teaching is really for me in the long term, but I do like that about it.
