"Busy" is Booming

While our economy continues to contract and college graduates find fewer and fewer opportunities for work, I have three jobs... and I am adding a fourth in two weeks' time.

I had two offers for full-time employment: one in August and one in September. I was wary to accept either since I already committed to three courses at two different schools. I added a fourth class two weeks ago. Two weeks from today, I will begin teaching a month-long graduate seminar in Composition Pedagogy for a university out in San Diego (class number five).

Even in these hard times, I will online-commute to a campus over 2,000 miles away and will teach future teachers of Composition how to be teachers of Composition-- invaluable job experience once I am on the national job market again next Fall.

But as of January, 2010, I will be full-time employed for the first time in six years. One and a half of those years I was unemployed but collected no unemployment benefits; we lived on one graduate research assistant stipend earned by Tom. It has never felt so good getting a pay check as it did in September.

Colleges are one place where business is quite recession-proof.

In fact, institutions of higher learning are in high demand by both the supply side and consumer side of the economy. One of the schools at which I currently teach two of my four courses had to turn students away in August. Luckily, I have a doctorate in a field that nearly *every* college and university has a universal requirement: Composition.

The students have changed, too.

I have fewer teenagers and twenty-somethings than those in their 30s and 40s, returning to school for a degree to earn better pay, to start a new career, to keep up with education credits demanded by their current employers.

Smaller, accredited schools are filling the gap, too, in terms of expense. I will be teaching full-time at a school next January that is seeking better accreditation and will be the only person on campus with a Ph.D. (it is a very small school).

Tom's path to getting his degree has been a long and winding one. We have to stay here for at least another year and a half before we move (he is applying to go to Antarctica to drill an ice core next fall and has been offered a post-doc fellowship for that year).

But, it seems, that "down" time will be very helpful in terms of my own vita.

I recall a number of years ago when my Dad asked me: "Why are you still in school?"

My response: "Dad, I will have a job whenever I need one with this degree. Every school in the country has a writing requirement. Those types of classes are the ones I am learning to teach, to research, and how to contribute to the scholarship."

Turning down jobs seems like a pretty good indication to me that a job in higher education is pretty safe.

Now if I could just find time to write...

Happy Monday All