I'm no longer a graduate student. I'm not a graduate student. I'm not a student. I'm employed.

That still sounds funny, but at least it sounds right.

For at least a year now the words “I'm a graduate student” have rung hollow in my ears. Yes, I was technically working on a degree, but I didn't feel like it was really all that meaningful in the long run. Was I going to be a professor? No, “publish or perish” is definately not the life for me. I crave “doing,” not writing. Call it a character flaw, but I need immediate gratification. So what was a PhD going to do for me? In the end I couldn't find an answer to that question, so I pulled a quick bail out into a(nother) MS and hit the pavement looking for a job.

I found one not far from where I started, right here at the UW working for University Communications as a Web Editor. It's a new position, and from what I've been told it's going to be a challenging one — a mixture that sounds just perfect to me. The beauty of the whole thing is they're going to let me continue to teach. Next semester it's a class on XHTML, server-side scripting and database management for the web. I'm thrilled.

It's been a good week.