Happy to Have a Job

The one-year MT program from which I graduated in Winston Salem, NC (after already having earned my bachelor's degree in Biology a few years earlier) only charged $2000 for tuition.  I was extremely lucky to earn a scholarship which covered that cost AND that of textbooks.  (The year after that, the tuition increased to $3000, so it would seem that I had excellent timing!)

More recently, I've gotten lucky with some extra hours of work on 2nd shift when people have called in sick with the flu or can't get out of their snowy/icy driveways. (Believe it or not, we DO get a bit of that frozen stuff down here every now and then... I drove 20 mph through snow on a two-lane road between Winston Salem and Thomasville, NC on the morning of St. Patrick's Day 2005, and Danville, VA got FIVE INCHES of snow on March 1-2 of this year.) :)

In late 2006, a reference lab in which I worked only paid me $14/hour (when I had two years of MT experience!) No matter how hectic it gets here with computer interfaces going haywire during morning run or whatever, I consider myself EXTREMELY LUCKY to have a job that at least pays more than that now.

Unfortunately my parents didn't help me pay for college.  I guess that wasn't clear in the blog, "my family" is my husband and I and our two daughters.  So I can sympathize with you on the tuition bills.  On the plus side, I was able to commute for school and only had to pay for classes.  

I'm definitely looking forward to having a two income household...  who knows, there may even be a vacation in the future!!

Unfortunately, hiring freezes are not new.  Almost a year before we started having the "horrible economy" shoved down our throats by the media every day, my current employer had even performed a pre-employment drug screen on me in January 2008, first told me the results were delayed, then came right out and called the Thursday before I was scheduled to start working to inform me that "the hospital could not fill my position." I had to work as a traveling laboratory professional last year in order to have a job.  Going to Indiana, West Virginia, and Texas would have been great for a single person fresh out of school, but it was rough on me, having a now 7-year-old daughter in western NC.

I drove all over Virginia (to Norfolk, Charlottesville, and Winchester) for three different permanent job interviews in May 2008 - and was not offered any of those positions in spite of "interviewing very well," according to the microbiology supervisor in Norfolk.  At the time, my frustration over the January hiring freeze in Danville and this additional unfair stress resulted in a man who claimed to love me cancelling our wedding two weeks beforehand because he "couldn't live with my anger issues."

Also, consider yourself extremely fortunate to have parents who can afford to help you pay for college.  My parents - and a lot of others out there, I'm sure - don't make anywhere near that kind of money.  I busted my rear end applying for several scholarships, graduating #3 in my high school class, and scoring 740 verbal/640 math on the SAT because I knew none of that college bill was coming out of their pockets.  It paid off because the only student loan I owed after graduating from a private NC college (whose tuition/room/board totalled about $16,000/year at that time) in May 2000 was $1000 for my last year.