… must come to an end.  No, not this blog.  My cushy part-time contracting job in my old career that has been paying the bills while I was in school.

Prior to deciding to change careers I had a well=paying career in IT.  I’m very good at that work.  But it is boring, unchallenging, and the idea of going to a cube every day for the next 25 years to do basically the same thing makes my brain hurt.  I decided to go back to school, get a PhD and change direction, leaving that money behind.

Of course it’s hard to walk away from that kind of salary.  I managed to convince the people I was consulting for to keep me on half-time doing the same work for the past 2 years.  This has been perfect; I get paid a generous hourly rate for an amount of work that lets me get my school work done, they keep my skills and the knowledge of their systems that I had developed, and everyone has been pretty happy.

Then the company got bought out.  The new company prefers to staff with employees, not contractors.  And employee spots are only created in full time increments.

So now I have to choose.  They have offered me a full time position with a good salary for that field (plus benefits which I don’t get now), which is far more than I will ever make as an academic, or I’m done there at the end of the year. 

I don’t want that as a career.  That’s why I’m working so hard to get a PhD.  But I don’t know if we can AFFORD for me to walk away.  I have no doubt that I can find other sources of income, but they won’t be a nice biweekly paycheck.  And they almost certainly won’t be this much money, certainly not for the same number of hours. 

And yes, I know I’m whining.  People go through graduate school on 18k/year fellowships.  However they aren’t 40something with a mortgage, bills and an existing lifestyle.

I know precisely why I’m considering this.  It’s a lot of money and my husband and I are fairly risk-averse.  Those are the ONLY good reasons to even consider taking this stupid offer.  But they aren’t trivial reasons.  And it’s scary to do otherwise.

I think I’m going to start shopping around my CV and resume for other part time gigs in the meantime…..