What Do I Want to Be When I Grow Up? - Part I

I recently started a temporary detail to another division in the agency where I work. I will be a part of this division until the middle of December. The division is "above" the division where I work and the work is at a much higher level than the granularity of processing and reference where I work every day. The detail comes at a good point, I was beginning to feel a little stale and it is my hope and expectation that I will return to my work refreshed and ready to be much more productive and efficient. (It will also coincide with those New Years Resolutions that I should make.) Let me be clear, I love what I do and am very glad to be doing it.

There is a larger question here as well, that being, am I doing what I want with my life?. Excepting those teenager part time jobs that I did growing up that kept me in candy and Matchbox cars, I have done a variety of things so far. I was a paperboy, but that got old rather quickly. I mean, really, delivering papers? In the morning? As previously discussed, I worked in a library, which was a job that I really enjoyed - likely pushing me in the direction of where I am now. Later, I also spent a few brief months as a bank teller before I started teaching.

One of the most fun jobs that I have had was one as a valet parking attendant. It was a job I got at the last minute (I needed money and responded to an ad and got sent out to a job that next evening). The money was really good and I had the opportunity to drive some really nice cars (and learn how to drive a standard). And there was always Prime Rib from the kitchen at the catering halls after the cars were all parked.

Inexplicable to many (including Mrs. BA), I spent a fair amount of time working in retail. I was never interested in the fast food or restaurant-type jobs, but I could work with people and I became fairly good at it. I rose through the ranks of retail, from a sales associate, to a trainer of new hires, then to a staffing supervisor, then finally "retiring" as a Senior Customer Service Manager (basically, when a customer got out of hand, they sent me to deal with them).

As for my first "real job," I was one of those people who went off to college fairly certain I knew what it was I wanted to be. I wanted to be a teacher. It had everything to do with the Social Studies teacher I had in high school. So I went to college and pursued that degree. My undergraduate degree was in American History (with a minor in Political Science - I am and always have been a political junkie) and I then set out to get my Masters Degree in Social Studies Education.

I performed my student teaching in the Junior High School where I went to school, a somewhat surreal experience. There were those teachers (ones that I had not had as a student) who I could call by their first names and then those that would always be referred to by their surnames. After my student teaching, I spent another year at good old Harry B. Thompson (by now) Middle School) as the building substitute, before getting my first real teaching job. Unfortunately, the educational system of which I wanted to be a part of did not exhibit the same fondness for me and I ultimately left education behind for a job in archives.

My career in archives started as a result of my first marriage. My wife at the time took a position in archives with the understanding that it was what she wanted to do. Then she realized it wasn't. She had also been recruited to return to a position as a library director for a small public library where we were living in the Hudson Valley. She jumped at the chance. I was at a point in my life where I was out of education, back in retail, and looking for something else. In my head I could hear the words of one of my beloved college professors - "You must make the decision to either teach students history or teach history to students." He never explained himself and left it up to us to figure out what he meant. As a teacher, I strove to emphasize the latter, using first-hand historical materials whenever possible and trying to make history as much fun for them as I had always found it.

So why not a job in archives, where I could be right next to those materials that I enjoyed working with for so long? I got myself an interview with the Director of the Archive Center and the rest is, as they say, history. As much as I thought I really had wanted to be a teacher, I had moved into a career that I really enjoyed.

In a subsequent post sometime next week, I will address several questions about how I got into the archives field (which have also been touched on here) and finally, address the idea that somehow my professional life may as yet, still be unfulfilled.