Leaving the Ivory Tower

sigh.

All around me, anxious and eager grad students prepare themselves for the next step: their post-MA life. They cram for their GREs, the write up statements of purpose, seek out letters of recommendation, etc. Me? I watch them. As it stands, I will not be entering Fall 2010 as a grad student...anywhere. For various reasons, I am in the process of leaving the Ivory Tower of Academia.

Its a dangerous, uncharted territory for me.

And as I head towards the light, I can only see the major pitfall of having been a student/scholar/academic for the past 6-going-on-7 years: I am completely and utterly at a loss.

Here's the thing, you think college would prepare you for a life beyond it. That it gives you the necessary skills to be successful post-bac as you head into the "real word" as a contributing member of society. That's what you think.

Now, granted, I'm sure that happens for some people. Let's just not call them students in the Humanities/Arts/Letters.

I made a conscious choice, oh, maybe 5 years ago, to abandon the path that leads you to A to B to C and gives you lots of money. What was I thinking?!?! Who would have thunk that 5 years down the road, I'd be backed up into a corner with no skill set, no path, and no options.

Stupid, stupid girl.

Okay, so I'm not completely without skills. They are just...peculiar and specialized. Specialized in a way that is advantageous to no one...not me, not society, nobody. And this, my friends, is the drawback and major complaint filed against academics: That their skill set exists only within the Ivory Tower.

The skills of research, argumentation, writing etc etc etc can make you successful in academia. But how do these skills translate to "real" jobs? They don't. So much of what threatens the university system is the fact that graduates are ill-equipped for the transition from "student" to "job applicant." Forget the civil engineers, the chem/bio majors, the poli-sci majors, business majors... what about me whose degrees are humanities and history....

And so, as I prepare to leave this Ivory Tower that has housed me, fed me and nurtured me, I can't help but feel a bit disgruntled that I will be left out in the cold. I can't do anything! I have always been a mix of "not good enough"-- not quite good enough to do Classics...although not quite good enough to do History, etc etc etc-- but this just takes the cake! Not quite good enough to survive? Not gonna lie, it hurts a little bit. Darwin would probably say that I should have been filtered out ages ago.

But here's the thing that worries me the most: I don't want to be one of those people who settle for whatever comes their way. I know that I've been blessed enough in my life to not have to worry about surviving from paycheck to paycheck, and that I've been given the opportunities that I didn't deserve, but I still choose to live a life that has meaning. I just need to figure it out. And soon!