I'm going to quit and join the circus

Now that it's summer time and I've settled into the routine of doing nothing, inevitably all I can think about is school. Well not school exactly, but what I'd like to do as far as school in the future. So when I entered into undergrad I had decided that the job I want to get doesn't require a graduate degree and is based mainly on what kind of design you can do and the portfolio you have. In the back of my head I know that. Going to grad school would be adding on two extra year's tuition for a job that I probably could get with a bachelor's. I kind of want to go though. It dawned on me that I only have two years of undergrad left until graduation and going into the real world and it scares the crap out of me. All of my friends will be going to grad school so I would be the first one out working. Places like this and this keep going through my head. It doesn't help that the other day I mentioned to my mom that it would be really cool to go on to grad school and she said easily "Sure, go for it." I don't think she realized what kind of financial committment that is though. The tuition money, however, is a really big consideration that I dont think I could handle, especially for a degree which might not even be important. I can't put myself into a $40,000 debt just on the whim that I want to continue school. I think this will take more research than just a pro and con list so here's the plan. I want to be able to teach graphic design in a good university one day (not high school!) so I'll have a chat with my design teachers next fall and see what they did and if they went on to get a master's or if they just established themselves in the field. I'm also going to check with my graphic design friends and see what they're planning to do. I also have contact info for some students who just went through the Yale MFA program so I may email them and get their thoughts. Can there really be an academic side to graphic design that merits going on to school or is it something you just pick up along the way? I guess this will take a lot more time to figure out, and I know no one really cares because everyone else has their own schooling crisis but it helps for me to get it all out.

I was so confident about what I wanted. What happened? I read an article in Time magazine a few weeks ago called "Meet the Twixters" which I think contributed to my grad school freak out. It was about this new generation between youth and adulthood where people are not growing up as fast as they did 30 years ago. The article posed the question "What are they waiting for? Who are these permanent adolescents, these twentysomething Peter Pans? And why can't they grow up?" Maybe unnecessarily, but it sent me into a bit of a quarter life crisis. I come home a lot. I'm close with my family. I don't date all that much and am nowhere near having a serious boyfriend. Very soon I'll be graduating and entering into a mundane world of cubicles and scenes from Office Space. Deadlines! The article went on to talk about how "In the past, people moved from childhood to adolescence and from adolescence to adulthood, but today there is a new, intermediate phase along the way. The years from 18 until 25 and even beyond have become a distinct and separate life stage, a strange, transitional never-never land between adolescence and adulthood in which people stall for a few extra years, putting off the iron cage of adult responsibility that constantly threatens to crash down on them. They're betwixt and between. You could call them twixters." They were mentioning that this one guy went to school for 6 years and came out with a degree in cognitive science and couldn't find a job so he had to become a waiter. Is that going to be me?

I guess the meltdown is a little dramatic and not warranted because things seem to have a way of working out, but it's something to be thinking about over the next year and something probably a lot of people have to think about.