Here’s a post to remind myself why I pursued work instead of studies:
1. I had a strong need to find out if what I was learning was actually happening on the ground. There were too many questions, too many conflicting messages, and too much certainty about such an uncertain world.
2. I knew I wanted to work in development/alternative economic systems, but I had no idea what I wanted to focus on for my graduate studies. I figured if I was going to spend two years of my Masters/PhD trying to find out what I wanted to focus on, I might as well get work experience, get out into “the real world,” and get money while doing all that.
3. I was, and am, hoping to magically bump into an amazing supervisor that I would do my graduate studies under. I thought it was better to follow a good supervisor to a good university, rather than going to a good university in the hopes of meeting a good supervisor. I don’t know if this goal would turn out though…
4. I was itching to travel, to “live local,” and to just get out of my comfort zone. I had four months in east Africa before I graduated and I was addicted (not necessarily to east Africa, but to, how should I put it, living basic). I wanted to have more conversations with people who come from a completely different background. I wanted to taste food I’d never even knew about. I wanted to be immersed in a language I couldn’t understand. To stand out, to be strange, simply because I was there.
5. To do something meaningful, small or big, that might leave an impact. Something tangible. Something useful. I had enough of writing yet another paper that no one was going to read. I wanted to find out that we can help without doing harm (this was amongst all the “dead aid” debate).
6. I had enough of being intellectual for a while (my timeline was 2 years). I wanted to experience and then reflect. Where will this take me? What have I learnt? Why am I here? Where should I go? How? Also on a more metaphysical level – why did I learn this in the classroom and now it’s different? How do you take an idea from theory to implementation? Am I doing the ethically correct actions during work? Can I do this any differently? I needed to take my intellect and let it experiment with hands-on work.
I guess I’ll have to evaluate how I’m doing with all these goals another time. As you might have guessed, yes, I’m in self doubting mode for a bit. I’ve been researching scholarships and I’m wondering if I should have gone right into graduate schools instead. My intuition still tells me I made the right choice…