entry 04
Now that it keeps getting closer and closer to June, it’s starting to sink in to me that — barring any crazy and frustrating circumstances — I am actually going to graduate. I don’t actually even trust the thought yet, so it’s not even happy-making, so much as just … unreal. And maybe a little scary, because oh my god, what comes next?
So I’ve been thinking a lot about that this week. Careerwise, well. I’m not qualified to go on into academia and graduate school. Publishing, whether books or comics, is really cutthroat, and I don’t have any internships or editing experience coming out of college. Library science is still a definite possibility, though: the program I’ve been looking at in New York offers a specialization in Rare Books and Special Collections, which is exactly where I’m most interested.
The thing is, though, before I do any of that, what I really want to do is go to Europe. If I don’t do it now, I probably never will, and it is something I want, almost desperately, and have for a long time.
Of course, I’m far from alone on this. There’s a long and storied history of poor desperate American kids with nothing to their names but a BA heading off to the continent. From what I can gather from research, there seem to be two main ways most of them achieve it: the first is teaching English, and the second is as an au pair.
I’m pretty sure teaching English is not the solution for me, though. There’s any number of problematic elements:
a) There’s not that many jobs in Europe, compared to other markets, like east Asia
b) Employers in Europe are way more likely to hire applicants who are already from the EU
c) TEFL is one of those things that’s gotten so huge it’s really incredibly hard to tell what is legit and what is a scam or just crappy
d) Most decent jobs require some sort of training, and courses are well over a thousand bucks
e) I’m not actually interested in teaching.
Being an au pair, on the other hand, sounds really appealling. You live with a foreign family, and in exchange for about 30 hours a week of helping with childcare and light housework, you get free room and board and some decent pocket money. (In the some of the programs I’ve looked up, they might even help pay towards your language classes, which, hey.)
The only real problem I see with this scenario is I don’t think I have enough childcare experience. I have some, at least. The entire fall of 2003, in between leaving Simon’s Rock and starting Evergreen, I spent at home babysitting for the 2-year-old and 4-year-old foster children while my parents were at work. Still, I don’t have any actual references. I guess that leaves the problem on what I can do within the next six months or so to make myself that much more qualified.
(Puck suggested that, since I still have a hole in my schedule for next term, I should consider taking a child development course, or something along those lines. This is a brilliant idea and I would totally take their suggestion, if it were not for the fact that I cannot find UO offering anything even vaguely similar.)
So, yes. So far my plans are to try and get more experience with babies and preschoolers, and to continue researching any other likely ways to get myself overseas. Advice is always welcome.