Here’s a post to remind myself why I pursued work instead of studies:<\/p>\n
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.<\/p>\n
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.<\/p>\n
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…<\/p>\n
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 \u00a0was there.<\/p>\n
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).<\/p>\n
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.<\/p>\n
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…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
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 […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":21767,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[300],"tags":[233,962],"class_list":["post-706","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-life","tag-education","tag-work"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.ubc.ca\/tiffanyt\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/706","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.ubc.ca\/tiffanyt\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.ubc.ca\/tiffanyt\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.ubc.ca\/tiffanyt\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/21767"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.ubc.ca\/tiffanyt\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=706"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.ubc.ca\/tiffanyt\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/706\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.ubc.ca\/tiffanyt\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=706"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.ubc.ca\/tiffanyt\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=706"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.ubc.ca\/tiffanyt\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=706"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}