Former Finnegan No. 2: Making the world a better place through blood donation

When I ran screaming from graduate school, my only thought was to get out. I wound up returning to the area where my family lived only because I didn't know where else to go. I got an apartment that I shared for a while with my sister and started aimlessly checking the classified ads in the newspaper.

Looking for a job when I felt like a failure (a drop out!) was disheartening, and when I  was told that I was over-educated for just about any kind of job in the "real world," I believed it. I was high-minded but forced to try to fit into a practical, workaday world where I felt ill at ease. Since I wanted to do something that would be a service to society rather than serving crass commercialism, I took a really lousy-paying job at a local non-profit community blood center as a donor recruiter. There were some things I liked about this job: giving informative and motivational speeches to businesses and organizations about the great benefits of blood donation, designing promotional materials such as posters and bumper stickers. There were also some things I loathed, such as cold-call selling to line up new donor groups.

Unfortunately, from my boss's point of view, about 90% of the job was cold-calling, while I preferred to believe it was all about community relations, so I gave great promotional pitches and did virtually no cold-calling. I suppose a smart manager might have let me adjust my job responsibilities to allow me to play to my strengths in a way that everyone would have benefited, but I wasn't so lucky. After awhile, I was given a "lateral promotion" into an administrative support position and, when that didn't make me quit, they just fired me. (My boss assured me he was "doing me a favor." It didn't feel like it at the time, but he was right.)

It took me awhile to reap the rewards of this experience, but in retrospect I can see that this job helped me recognize in myself talents that the job didn't really make much use of -- such as public speaking and designing promotional materials. I also see that I hadn't yet learned what my grad school experience should have taught me -- don't just keep doing what you're doing if it's making you miserable. Try something else, even if you're not sure what that should be.

Former Finnegan No. 1: The Ace Student

Before I start describing the transition I'm currently going through, I thought I would begin with a little recap of my life up until I lost my teaching job at a Midwestern university a few years back. If you haven't already read "Dumped off the merry-go-round," you should do that first. I say there that I'm currently reinventing myself for about the fifth time; here are my former identities:
 

The Phi Beta Kappa Kid

I started off as an ace student -- National Merit Scholar, Phi Beta Kappa, double major, etc. Liberal arts the way. Very impressive to everyone but myself. I seemed to be the only one who realized I worked hard at being a good student because I had no idea how to do anything else. The problem is, the people who might have helped me find a direction in life either didn't bother (because I seemed to have it all together) or didn't know anything but academics themselves (faculty mentors), so they just encouraged me to go on to graduate school straight after college. (I fantasized about joining the Peace Corps, but I was afraid that might turn out to be too much "real life" experience.)

So I trusted my faculty advisers, took their advice, and three months after graduating from my tiny liberal arts college I was enrolled as a Ph. D. student in a comparative literature program at a humongous state university. As a Teaching Fellow I was instructing students just a little younger than myself but who completely lacked my zeal for learning, and I was taking courses in literary theory that managed to suck all the joy out of literature. I found grad school cold and competitive in an every-man-for-himself kind of way, so even though I was at a big university, I felt very lonely. I knew that I was there only because I didn't know what else to do. Pretty soon, I found that I was miserable, and this time I had no faculty mentors to turn to. After a couple of years, I simply fled back to my home state, looking to do anything except being an academic.

What did I learn from this experience? That you shouldn't keep at something just because you're good at it, if it's eroding your life in other ways. Unless you have faith in yourself, the praise of others will be cold comfort.