the hardest question OR wisdom from the maine islands

I'm in the process of writing a grant proposal in hopes of getting some funding for my project here in grad school. Mostly I'm adapting materials I submitted in January for another grant that I JUST BARELY missed receiving. However, there is one section - number 15 - in this grant application that is different than the previous one...and it's amazingly tough.

Sounds simple enough: Long Term Career Goal. I'm sure I could pull together something and make it sound convincing, but the question still remains...what do I really want to do?

My gut reaction is to write about how I want to become a professor or other instructor (maybe even high school or middle school), cleverly masking this goal (since for some reason a lot of academics look down on teaching as a career goal) with wording that is more along the lines of "training" students or even just "future investigators," which would also secretly encompass my ACTUAL desire to leave the work force and be at home and raise children. That is, after all, what I (mostly) want to do. But is it really? I've seen that as I go through life, I learn about mroe and more careers that I never knew existed before. Like policy-advising...drug regulation...scientific writing...investment consulting...sales...scientific database development and management (I'm referring to Los Alamos National Laboratory databases here)... How am I supposed to know what I want to do when I don't even know what there is for me TO do?

One thing I know for sure is that I would like to do something that "helps people" a lot more than what I'm doing now. Yes, I'm researching ways to prevent the spread of HIV, but I have thus far made zero progress and see absolutely NO benefit to anybody from my three years of working here. All I've done is use tax dollars (as that is where my pay originates from) to pay for my comfortable living and supplies for experiments that don't work very well but that I get to present at meetings, which I travel to also on government money. I feel more like a criminal than a helper!

All I can determine from that is that I want to help people in some way. Teaching would be helping them, in my mind, although nursing or food service would be much more tangible ways of helping. And, in reality, if I want to be helping people with HIV, I'd be better off serving in a village in Africa!

There's always the argument, though, that I would be "wasting" my intelligent scientific mind if I left my current field and went to another.

As I began to ponder all this, I happened over to the library to pick up the video version of Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone. While there I thought I'd try to track down my favorite knitting pattern book ever, Sweaters from the Maine Islands. It contains a pattern I'm going to start knitting soon and another one that I faintly remembered and thought might be good for my mom, so I wanted to see if I could find it. I hadn't seen it in the library for a while, as the library has been in transition for over a year. I finally asked a librarian, and she kindly dug it up for me from the oversized books, which were in hiding. (Librarian might also be a helping job I'd enjoy.) Not only does the book contain great sweater patterns, it also has some brief commentary about life on the little island off the coast of Maine where the designer lives and works and knits and publishes patterns.

Curled up in bed one night I read one of these musings. It described the island's workers - people mostly work at building or repairing buildings and boats or as teachers or store operators. And it described the island itself - with one small dump for everyone's trash, a school with 65 students ages 5 through 18, miles from the conveniences of a big city.

It made me think. About the meaning of work. About my career goals. About my significance in my career. And about the way I spend my money and live my life. I realized that, compared to the island life, there is little practicality in my work. All those jobs were serving jobs, jobs that met a need of some sort. That desire in my heart for a "helping job" isn't just what I want, it's something that makes logical sense. And I just don't see my research as a helping job. Not the way I want to see it.

So...what? Am I seeing my job as less important than it is? Is my current position just a stepping stone to something that IS useful - or is it merely a waste of time and other peoples' money? If now is just a step, what's that next, grand thing I'm supposed to be working my way to?

The more I think about it, the less sure I am that I have a true answer to section 15: Long Term Career Goal. Even "get married and raise children" doesn't speak to the deepest desire of my heart - to HELP.