Wishful Wednesday

'I wish' .... I could go back and spend one day working at a job from my youth, and it would be as a graduate research assistant!

This isn't exactly from my youth because I didn't work as a teenager, but it is a job I'll never really get to go back to. I was in grad school for a year and a half before I did student teaching and for the first two semesters I had the good fortune to have a job working for my professor as a research assistant. (The third semester I was a teaching assistant and had my own undergrad community health class.) I was paid out of grant money and received the same stipend no matter how many hours I worked. Most weeks it worked out to about $25 an hour. Seriously, can you beat that? It was the cushiest job ever and I loved it. I had an office with a fellow GA and we set our own hours, with whatever breaks to walk around campus or go to lunch that we wanted and the rest of the time that we were in the office we could pretty much just take care of homework unless there was real work to be done. The main project we were doing was research for an evaluation of abstinence education programs which I found really fascinating. My boss encouraged me to pursue my own research and gave me every opportunity for professional development possible. Maybe I'll get to be a professor myself someday and have the same great set up!