Identity or Job?

When I graduated from college, I wore a green ribbon pinned to my gown with a small gold safety pin. It signified a promise my fellow "Marine Science Club" members and I had made to consider the environment before taking any job. What it meant to me at the time was that I should not be involved directly in environmental degradation or military defense work. In reality, I was looking more for an identity than a job, having just quit my Borders gig after getting into graduate school. Being in my early twenties, I believed that I was destined for a professorship, running a research lab, and teaching college students about Biology. A job. In fact, I identified as a Biologist. My job was as a graduate student, teacher of college lab sections, and mentor to 1-3 undergrads per semester in the laboratory. When I graduated from grad school I was six-months into a postdoctoral research position, my first "real" Biology job.

Or was it?

A post-doctoral position has the same student-adviser relationship plus benefits and masquerades as a job. Really it is an underpaid stint of research in which one is expected to publish and job hunt, for only a slightly less temporary employment. After years of being mentally invested in my "job", because it really was my identity, I was tired of not being taken seriously.

So I left and am now in the process of redefining my work-life balance. I want to be a high school science teacher at a private school, a place where I can be involved in curriculum development and scientific literacy training.

So here is the question. Am I going to be sad when next fall comes around and I still don't have a job? By the way, only teachers with multiple years experience at the high school level are being hired right now. I have a great deal invested in my volunteer work - community science curriculum development for the Fells Reservation (Medford, MA) - but can that be enough? Am I going to feel unemployed? Can I figure out a way for the volunteering I do to take the place of employment until I find my teaching job?

One barrier to this is that people that work in volunteer situations often don't have the same level of professionalism (personal boundaries) that employees in larger organizations have. Solutions? Demand it. More on that next post.