making decisions about the future

So it’s appearing that choices are being made for me, at least for my conscious self. The current project I’m working on is good enough for only a masters, which is fine. The soonest I could finish it would be spring of 2007. And while I could still work on a PhD project, I don’t honestly know if there’s one for me to work on. My instinct, which could be wrong, is that my advisor doesn’t want to keep me on for more than a masters, and is thus helping me get out the door with my masters and move on. So I have the distinct feeling I’d have to shop around or come up with something on my own.

But do I want to? If you read my post on Embracing Greatness from July, you’ll see that I understand where my heart lies, and it simply isn’t in physics. It’s music, it always has been. So I’m faced with an interesting situation.

If I graduate in May, which I probably will, I have to start paying back loans. Obviously that’s a bad thing, because I have a ton of school debt. I would need to make around $14 an hour full time to pay for everything, and that’s assuming Carrie had disability. Scary, huh? And while I do have a masters in physics, what can I use it for? I’d like to teach, though that probably wouldn’t pay enough. I don’t have much training, so to go to industry at this point isn’t easy, though I’m still hoping something will work out.

So that leaves my next idea, which is going back to school to get a second bachelor’s degree. This way, at least I’m deferring my loans, and can hopefully still get enough to cover my tuition and such. But then, what do I go back for? At first I thought about aerospace, because it’s related to the work I’ve been doing, and is still interesting to me. Except I don’t honestly know if I’d be accepted.  It’s highly competitive, with only 10% of the transfers coming from out of state (it’s the law).  Plus, I don’t know if I really want to continue working on this stuff, especially knowing that our future is in music.

So I started to think of other areas I’d like to study.  Geology?  Interesting, but very difficult.  I don’t think I have the patience for it.  Comparative religion?  Possibly, but I’m not sure I’m able to do that right now, belief wise.  I wouldn’t want to fight my own resistance to things when there are grades on the line.

At this point I was getting worried, because I couldn’t find anything at UT I really wanted to do, or could do.  But today, it came to me.  What about ACC?  I could get a degree in commercial music management, which is exactly what we’ll be doing with our business!  What a concept, to get a degree in the area I plan to work in!  So that’s the plan for now.  If I can work, and work on that degree at the same time, things could work out very well.  I already have 20% of the requirements done from my previous undergrad work, so that helps too.  And I get to do what I really love!  Without it being super intellectual.  Sounds perfect to me!

So in the end, it looks like my subconscious/soul is creating the series of events necessary so I don’t actually have to make a decision, I’ll just have to act.  Perhaps a visual description will help.  Right now, I’m walking through the woods, on a path that’s becoming more rocky and difficult to walk.  In fact, it’s getting so overgrown that I may have actually lost my path all together, and am walking just to keep moving.  So my soul has gone out to scout ahead.  It has already found the path, and is now working to connect that path to the path I’m currently on.  All I have to do is keep walking, and I will run smack into the new path.  I’ll know that it’s there because it’s smooth, and wide, and easy to see.  In the meantime, I just stay the course, because I know that new path will be there in time.  I know this because it has been the case for the previous 27 years of my life, and there’s no reason to believe it won’t happen this time.

So I’m going to keep walking…and let the path come to me.  Then I’ll act, and begin my new life focus.