It's Official, Amen.

Now that it is official, I can share my good news. This afternoon my job offer from a local liberal arts college became real, the paperwork is going to HR, and soon I will submit my two weeks notice to the Center where I currently work.

There are a lot of reasons why this is an exciting move. First, there is the grad school thing. I went to grad school and got my master's degree. In my current job that degree has no bearing on anything. Once my degree was in hand, my duties did not change, my income did not increase, and in fact, my satisfaction with doing work below my skill level drastically declined especially since I graduated.

Another good reason for the move is that my new job is the beginning of my new career path. Although my current job has provided me some good experience, learning, and exposure, the reality is that I often am not doing the work in a way that is meaningful. By contrast my new position will be using my masters degree, and doing exactly what I set out to do when I left teaching. It is a really great feeling to have finally made it.

My last reason for why this is a good move is just simply to not have to see the Horrible Supervisor every day anymore! This sounds petty, but it is not. Since this summer when she returned from maternity leave, there was sort of an unspoken agreement that she should leave me alone and that her boss, would ultimately be the person I worked with and checked in with. That has worked out really well and it was a huge improvement. However, in some ways seeing Horrible Supervisor every day, dealing with her snarky comments in meetings, her inability to deal well with people, her inflexibility, and unwillingness to consider shades of gray rather than black or white in the end drove me nuts since she was still apart of a small staff. Although I am generally extremely good at hiding my great dislike for her, in recent weeks I have had a hard time not laughing out loud at her, often in my mind giving her the middle finger as I walk past her cube.

Lastly, another beautiful thing about making the job move is that I am staying in the same neighborhood as the Center. Husband and I will still commute together, I will still be close to the co-op, the bus line and LRT, and all the people who I know on the other campus. I will continue to contract with my current center on the oral history project for a few hours a week, and I will remain in the community where I did much of the research for my thesis.

All in all, it is a great move. In a little over two weeks I will move into my new office and don the title of Coordinator of Community and Civic Engagment. and as my father-in-law stated today, I will for the first time become part of the "Lutheran Family". Amen is what I say to that.