What with recent developments (good ones) at work, I've giving some thought to which direction I'd like my career to go. My mother, by now, is thoroughly annoyed and wishes I'd just make up my mind already. I've resigned myself to the fact that writing is not a lucrative career, and that I enjoy doing things such as driving a car (preferably an efficient one) and eating dinner and living in an apartment, all of which generally require money which is generally the accepted form of payment for work, but which is rarely given in payment for writing, at least in the amounts required to continually perform those previously mentioned actions.

I've gone through so many options recently, and if I'm gonna waffle, now's the time to do it. Far better to do it now, during my quarter-life crisis (there was article about this in news somewhere...), than to wait until I've got a husband, children, and a mother in a retirement home all depending on (or maybe just enjoying) my paycheck. Also far better to do it now than after I invest another $60,000 into my education.

Point is (stop rambling, Erin), 15% of my job, by my boss's estimate, is working on our in-house CMD, which I have been part of developing (although not a huge part, mind you). Another 10% or so is data analysis. The rest of it is customer service. I'm okay with that as long as I have to be, but I'm realizing more and more that if it weren't for that large portion (larger than those estimates show) of data manipulation in all it's glorious forms, I would really hate my job. And I don't. I love my job. I adore my job, in fact. Not enough to stay here forever, but enough to stay here for at least another few years if necessary (unless I find that beachy paradise I've been hunting for). But here's the bottom line: I want to be what my boss's boss lovingly refers to as a data monkey. (Don't overlook the significance of this statement. This is easy for guys to say, but I'm a girl. Girls who major in physics and enjoy fiddling around with data inevitably intimidate people, which is exceptionally frustrating, and a separate rant altogether.)

So now I have goals. Now I have a direction. Now I know what I need to tell St. Leo's when I call them up and ask about course availability and complain that they currently have no courses in how to be a data monkey (I'm giggling when I say that, of course, imagining a course titled "Data Monkey-ing 101").

They have plenty of courses on other things, all of which interest me and all of which are extremely useful in understanding how the data works. So no need to switch degrees. But I'm in love with data. Period, end of story. I need classes on how to better love that data, though. I need to learn how data wants to be treated, how it behaves, what sort of environments it prefers. I need to be an anthropologist of data. Now for some more research...