Your Tax Dollars at Work, Part 2

Someday, I'm going to have to sit down and calculate how much extra money the government has devoted to me, above and beyond the normal things like public schooling and my salary as a teacher. I suspect the total will be staggering.

There were a couple of nice summer programs in junior high and high school, science and literature camps funded entirely by the state. Things got a bit crazier when I hit college. In addition the standard state subsidy for my university, I got a sizable scholarship from the state. They were willing to throw $40,000 at me to try to keep me around after graduation, and I accepted $30,000 of their money. I guess it worked; the feeling of moral indebtedness played at least a small role in my decision to ask to be assigned to teach in my home state when Teach For America asked about my geographic preferences.

Then there's the research funding. My first summer research internship was partially funded by a private foundation, but the second was funded entirely by the NSF and paid handsomely. Throw in the funding for lab supplies and a dorm room, and that was an expensive summer. Then my great state decided to give me a grant to pay myself to shoot lasers at proteins, pay my advisor a pittance for his help, and buy still more lab supplies. That struck me as a spectacularly inefficient use of state funds, especially given that I was going to do the work for my thesis anyway and could requisition funds for supplies from one of my fellowships.

I probably don't want to know how much has been invested in turning me into a TFA corps member. I'm sure paying all of the people involved in my training has not been cheap, and later this summer I'll be getting a Americorps funding of $4,700-something to use for graduate school. If they renew the funding, I'll be getting a similar award next year.

Now I'm up to my eyeballs in "professional development". By the end of the week I should have 82 hours, all from classes that are not only free, they come with stipends. I wasn't aware that this program came with a stipend since the packet of materials they sent me went missing in the mail, and I have no idea how much they're paying, but last week I got $250. This program also registered me for a dorm room even though I told them I could commute from my parents' so I'm typing this from a two bedroom, four bed, private bath suite that the luck of the draw has me occupying alone. I've got another week in July down where I went last week; that one pays $625 and provides a dorm room. The programs also provide some supplies to take back to the classroom that are worth hundreds of dollars.

I can't help but think there's been some mistake. Huge amounts of money were invested in developing one individual believed to be valuable human capital, but I'm not sure what the return on that investment will be. My undergraduate research was a lot of fun for me, but I suspect it could have been done better, faster, and cheaper. I'm gradually getting better at teaching, and I suspect this week in particular is going to have a positive impact on how I approach ninth grade physical science, but I would have been equally happy commuting and not getting paid. I can't help but feeling that somehow, someday, I need to do something to justify all of this expense.

Self doubt and selfishness.

It's time to get serious about the rest of my life. I need to register for tests and start studying in earnest, blocking out the hours a day to devote to binging on esoteric vocabulary words and learning to speed solve tricky physics problems. Once I get going in earnest, maybe this queasy feeling in the pit of my stomach will disappear.

I'll be without a stout safety net for the first time in my life. Before I even sent in my application, my state university offered me a substantial scholarship so I knew that even if they found me unworthy of a bigger, more prestigious fellowship and the other schools rejected me, I was going to be able to go to college. When I was worrying over my Teach For America application, I was reasonably certain that the graduate education program at my university would be happy to have me, even though I did let self doubt get the better of me at times. However, I've watched a decent physics student set his sights too high and get rejected by every school he applied to, plus a couple of others get a long list of rejections and ultimately land somewhere thanks primarily to faculty members talking to friends in other departments in the hopes of securing a slot in an unexpected opening.

Plus, the competition has grown more fierce since the recession makes jobs in industry much harder to come by. The top physics student in this year's graduating class initially got rejected by a school my professors considered a good fit for me last year, back before I let my physics skills atrophy, and he's a much stronger candidate than I could have been. The school in question has gone to a points based system for evaluating candidates where they look mostly at grades and scores. Somehow I don't think they give points for accomplishments like helping a fourteen year old finally master adding fractions or writing grant proposals to get a bunch of impoverished high school students ACT prep materials. And they probably shouldn't: it doesn't demonstrate physics skills.

There's always going to be a thought lurking in the back of my mind that I'm not good enough. I'm not that brilliant; I'll never be Feynman, Maxwell, Bohr, or Newton. I get by by the skin of my teeth, with plenty of difficulty and with support from wonderful mentors. My chief virtue isn't in being innately gifted, it's in continuing to plod along even though I'm not. I still worry that someday soon I'll reach material that I simply won't be able to master, no matter how hard I try, that the math will throw a brick wall in my path and it will turn out that I'm not an unstoppable object after all.

Then there's the other problem with becoming a scientist: I dreamt of my kids last night. After this last year, they are my kids. I may not have done much good, but the problem of educational inequity is now my problem in a way it wasn't when I joined this crazy organization. Trust me, if you'd spent a year in one of these schools, you'd be mad as hell too. Spending another year in the classroom may help a few kids, and that's worth doing, but it doesn't begin to touch our country's deeper educational and cultural problems. I might do a little more to help if I were more like my friends, considering careers in educational administration, counseling, or non-profit administration, like my cousin's girlfriend the social worker, like my boyfriend's mother the attorney ad litem for kids in foster care.

Yet I'd rather study science. I don't think I'd be good at any of those noble professions. I like teaching, but liked teaching college students as well, and I miss the lab. I'll probably never cure a dreaded disease or solve our energy problems, but that's okay, that isn't why I want to do this.

I don't think I'm romanticizing the job of being a researcher. Doing science often isn't glorious. There aren't a ton of eureka moments. You spend a lot of time writing grant proposals that might not get funded, plotting eighteen billion graphs to make meaning of those strings of raw data, waiting for the repair guy to get the immunofluorescent microscope in working order, aligning the optics so your laser beam hits at precisely the right angle, or analyzing why your filters have exploded and spewed your painstakingly prepared sample all over the floor again. Often, though, you do get to investigate neat things, and even the question of why the gosh darned filters are exploding (or whatever the similar problem in your lab happens to be) is an interesting puzzle when looked at in the right light. Ultimately, I can't think of anything more exciting than getting paid to be curious.

Worrying about the boy

My boyfriend turned twenty three on Friday so he headed down to his parents' and I headed up for the weekend. It was beyond wonderful to see him, but he was clearly very stressed out. The good news is that he has a new job. The bad news is that his job may vanish in June.

After he got laid off, he almost immediately swung into action and began hunting for a new job. He quickly found a company that offered him a couple of days' work with the prospect of more permanent employment after the trial period. It didn't pan out. He then proceeded to find call the roughly seventy five electrical contractors in the area, and a handful were taking applications for apprentices. He got a few interviews, and then he got offered a job. However, he was warned early on that if the company doesn't get more big projects after the completion of the ones they're working on right now, he'll likely be laid off. Having a job is better than not having a job, especially when you have bills to pay, but the whole situation is disheartening.

If he doesn't have a job at the start of the fall semester, he'll be unable to continue the classes for his apprenticeship. If that happens, he'll likely lose the credit for the two and a half years of coursework he'll have completed by then and basically have to give up on becoming an electrician. It's an utterly lousy situation, and I can see it wearing him down.

I'm powerless to help. There's no way to magically make the economy better and get people building things and hiring electricians again, but being so far away makes me feel especially useless. I can call, email, and be a sympathetic ear and a sounding board, listen as he muses about what to do next if layoffs hit at his new company, futilely try to reassure him that he's a wonderful person and the situation at hand is not a reflection on him, tell him dumb jokes, and remind him that he is so much more than just an electrician. I can't, however, make him dinner, hug him, or hold him down and tickle him when he's had a rough day.

Signs of the economic times.

The pizzeria where my mom and brother work is still doing well. It helps that they're located on the outskirts of a "nice" neighborhood filled with college professors and educated professionals, not exactly the groups hardest hit at the moment. However, my mother has noticed that there's been a significant drop in the number of people ordering sodas. At a $1.75 a pop, cokes can certainly jack up the price of dinner out with the family.

Could it be that people are actually learning to prioritize and exercise fiscal restraint?

Bigger and better things.

I had a job I was good at, once, spending the odd Saturday working in my art teacher's son-in-law's plant nursery. My qualifications were impeccable: I was young, able-bodied, and willing to work for a pittance. It was fantastic. I'd come out of the chill and drizzle to a bright, verdant paradise heavily perfumed by the microbes in the fresh loam.

I screwed up at first, adding fertilizer pellets that would have burned the plants' tender roots, but my boss noticed, I owned up to the mistake, and he patiently showed me what to do differently. From then on, the work was simple and pleasant, filling pots with soil, transplanting flowers, adding fertilizer, and hauling the pots across the greenhouse to hoist up and hang along the irrigation tubes. My boss praised me for doing my job efficiently, with no qualms about getting covered in dirt in the process and no proclivity toward getting sidetracked by conversation. I proved useful in other ways, as well, using my meager knowledge of Spanish to translate for my boss and the two men whose task it was to mix the soil, a job that required a worker with a strong back, but not necessarily a command of English.

So went my days, plodding cheerily on in my own little world, carrying out my small tasks and listening to Patsy Cline on the radio. At lunchtime, the boss's wife brought us hot dogs, and we rested, telling dumb jokes and washing our meals down with icy Cokes. When evening came, I'd survey the rows of petunias and impatiens before heading home, aching and filthy, eager to stumble into a hot shower.

It couldn't last, of course. I had ambitions and so headed off to university. When the summers came, I sought employment that would further those ambitions, and, with transcripts full of A's and letters from learned professors attesting that I was bright and diligent, I found plenty of labs willing to induct the newest bottle washer and button pusher into the profession. So my days played out under sterile hoods that reeked of ethanol and in basement laboratories lit only by the laser light and the dim glow of ancient computer monitors.

My tasks were less clear cut than in the greenhouse, and I struggled mightily at times. I found eighty-seven ways not to stain rat hippocampus for immunofluorescent microscopy and watched filters explode again and again. It took weeks and months to develop the techniques to get crotchety equipment to yield meaningful results. I wrote painfully dull grant proposals.

On the best of days, I sat for hours in the dark pushing buttons and adjusting settings while watching my proteins dance to the Brandenburg Concertos as a squiggly line produced by inscrutable software. When I managed to steal away for five minutes while waiting for heaters to come up to temperature, I generally devoured a granola bar and a stick of reduced fat string cheese in the windowless office adjoining the lab. At the end of a day, if I was very lucky, I'd have some grainy pictures of red and green blobs or a string of numbers that hours of analysis would turn into meaningful graphs, and I was eventually able to cobble together a poster and a thesis. I clung to the hope that my techniques might help the biology lab progress in their effort to help treat stroke victims or that my protein denaturation data might provide some clue to some latter-day Watson and Crick unraveling the mysteries of life.

As my undergraduate career drew to a close, I began seeking yet another job. After writing essays, getting still more letters of recommendation, and going through interviews, I somehow managed to dupe people into believing that I was not just a good student, I was a problem-solver, a striver, a potential leader in a grand movement. It was enough to get me a position teaching science in a room where the grey paint peels from the cabinets and the students litter the floor with wrappers from their forbidden sweets.

I fail daily here. Even when it works, it isn't enough, never really enough, for significant gains. I worry that I'm actually widening the achievement gap. The best sound I can hope for is a moment of silence, an instant where every student is on task instead of chattering or striving to invent new ways to annoy me or his neighbors. I rarely eat lunch, save perhaps a packet of the saltines some clever student keeps leaving on my desk, as I spend my time grading and planning. At the end of each day, I head home with a headache and another bag full of failing quizzes to grade. I pray that someday some student will be better off for my having been here, that something he learned from me about Newton's Laws, ionic bonds, pseudostratified epithelial tissues, or how to study and solve a problem will make a difference, and he'll end up with a career instead of a dead end job or with some new spark of curiosity about the world, or at least there will be one fewer poor black kid in prison or on welfare, but, honestly, I doubt it.

There's always an opportunity cost.

One of the many nice aspects of being assigned to the Mississippi Delta is the chance to get a masters in education for free through a program that offers an assistantship for a community project rather than serving as a teaching assistant. I'd assumed that I'd want to sign up, but now I'm having second thoughts.

Teaching is going to be time consuming. There's no way around that. Starting a graduate program in my second semester as a high school teacher sounds like a great way to increase my stress levels, but I think I could probably handle it.

The going to school full-time during the summer part is the problem. I'm going to spend this summer at Institute trying to learn about teaching while teaching summer school in Houston. Last summer I worked in the physics lab full-time as an undergraduate researcher, and I spent two months before my junior year living in New York in order to work full-time in a molecular biology lab there. The summer before my sophomore year I took two semesters of organic chemistry. I like productive vacations, but I may need to focus next summer on tasks other than coursework.

If I want to get a Ph.D. in physics, the dreaded Physics GRE is the next big hurdle. Everyone I've talked to describes it as a grueling experience, in no small part because it doesn't reflect how anyone actually does physics. The key to success is memorizing vast numbers of equations, constants, and terms and being able to solve problems very, very quickly. Six months preparation time is recommended, making sure to work through all of University Physics I through Modern Physics until you know it cold and going back over your notes from upper division classes to refresh your memory of various key problem types. If I'm going to have a prayer of doing well enough to get into a good physics graduate program after spending time away from enforced discipline of being a student, I'm going to have to make studying for the test my top priority next summer.

It would be much easier if I knew what I want to do with my life. If teaching in a secondary classroom is going to be a long term career, then getting a masters in education is clearly the right choice. If I'm going to miss higher level physics and research enough to want to become a professor and teach at the college level instead, then I need to hit the GRE prep as hard as possible. Unfortunately, the only thing I'm truly certain of tonight is that I really don't want to do my electromagnetism homework right now.

Why is everyone so determined to give me money?

It's weird. I haven't been going out of my way to look for employment other than summers of research where the great pay was a less important consideration than the lab experience, but people in authority keep offering great opportunities.

Last semester, I was co-TAing a University Physics I lab section (unpaid), and then my advisor asked me to consider tutoring a student in the class who needed some extra help. The student was a joy to work with, helped make me a better instructor for my class, and paid enough to cover my grocery bills for the semester. Funding from a state research grant I received enabled me to pay myself to do thesis research this semester. A fellowship that didn't even require an additional application means I'll get a signing bonus this summer.

I've just received an email offering me a job I didn't know existed and can't take. The math department offers one partial TA position to a student in the master's program in teaching, paying him or her $3,000 a semester in exchange for teaching a two-hour-a-week remedial evening class and spending four hours a week providing algebra help in the tutoring center. The professor who offered me the position knows (or at least knew) I'm going to do Teach for America, plus I'll only have a minor in math, so I'm quite surprised I was considered at all. I'm drafting a polite note letting her know that if I didn't have other plans I'd jump at this chance but I cannot accept the job.

Is it normal to feel a bit guilty about my good luck? People keep talking about how hard I've worked, but it doesn't feel like it. I haven't really sacrificed. I have certain aptitudes that prove useful, and I'm a hedonist whose preferred pleasures tend to be academic in nature. Yes, I put in time and effort; this is just what I do. Some of my activities have put me in contact with people who share my interests and are in a position to guide me toward interesting opportunities, but I haven't made an effort to network, it just happened. There are a lot of people around me who really strive for success, and it doesn't seems fair that I can just drift along and achieve the same results.

On Purpose

My impending graduation and the process of interviewing with TFA and the master's program have forced me to reflect on what I'm doing with my life. I'd like to think I gave good answers to those sorts of questions in the interviews, but in reality I'm not so sure where I'm headed. I've found a few things I'm rather good at doing, at least a couple of which are of benefit to others and could ultimately lead to jobs that pay enough to survive, but right now my sense of purpose in life is waning.

There are some people who find careers that are absolutely perfect fits, whose purpose in life matches up extremely well with what others will pay them to do. A couple of weeks ago my dad asked me if I had ever met Dr. Suchandsuch who used to be on the physics faculty at my school. I expressed a bit of amusement at the idea that I could have somehow escaped meeting him; even though he retired in 1999, he still comes in to work five days a week so I see him in the hallways and at department events all the time. This guy enjoyed his job so much that his dream retirement consists of doing most of the same things he did while he was working for pay, minus some of the duller administrative aspects and department politics.

Many people find themselves in careers that they aren't so passionate about but still take some satisfaction in. I think my father falls into this category. He's a mechanical engineer and finds his job slightly boring. Engineering is still the best possible field for a car-obsessed math and science geek, and he's found a low-stress job he's good at that leaves him plenty of time to read and pursue other interests (mathematics, philosophy, and history, lately with a focus on Mediaeval Europe, in addition to all things automotive) during the hours he isn't at work.

Then there are those who are almost completely adrift, like my brother. He's a sophomore who hates college. He has no idea what he wants to do with his life, and after over a year and a half as an undeclared major who has been taking physics, programming, and math classes, the only thing he's sure of is that he doesn't want to do physics or programming and couldn't make a career of math. He is very bright, but is perpetually in danger of losing his scholarship because he doesn't keep up with the work and doesn't see the point of doing so if it isn't leading to anything anyway. My parents are encouraging him to defer his scholarship for a year, find some menial job, live at home and pay rent, and, they hope, discover some motivation to finish school, if only to escape the menial jobs.

I've watched people I care about hit that problem where they don't see where they could possibly be going in life, and I've experienced it myself. It's still a struggle to accept not having a long-term plan and press on anyway. I have to keep trying to find productive things to do in the meantime and hope that I'll eventually find a niche in the world.