Today, for the first time in years, I sent in a job application for a position technically outside academia. It's for a job in a museum, one for which I'm not completely qualified, but that I'd love to have, in a museum I visited frequently as a child. I'm pretty sure I could do the job, as I have acquired the required skill sets over the past several years--just not in a museum setting.
How cool would it be to walk past dinosaur skeletons on my way to the office every day?
I'm torn about applying for jobs outside the academy, for all the usual reasons, but mostly now because I've come to really love the flexibility of academic schedules. Yes, as teachers and scholars we work more than 40 hours a week with some regularity, but dammit, I can nap at 2 p.m. every afternoon, snuggled up to my infant son. And that means a lot to me, as does the fact that I can spend a lot of time with my husband, who works from home.
So when I say I'm afraid that I won't land a teaching job, my fears are not entirely about the not-teaching part of that eventuality. There's far more at stake.
Still, dinosaur skeletons and taxidermied habitat groups . . . Gotta love 'em.
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