From one school I have a Bachelor's degree in Public Administration, which basically meant a major in Political Science and minors in both Business and History. Graduated Magna Cum Laude and if I remember correctly, I had about a 3.8+ GPA and graduated with a string of honors behind my name, including Outstanding Public Administration Major, Phi Beta Kappa, etc.
From another school I have an Accounting degree. 4.0 GPA on that one.
Finally, from still another school, I took a bunch of other stuff, just for fun (Philosophy, more history courses, and enough Russian to be a couple of semesters away from yet another degree in that). 4.0 GPA there too.
Went to work in accounting following the 'textbook' career path - Big 4 accounting firm, large local accounting firm, Fortune 500 company, blah, blah, blah. Bored as hell, but doing okay until I finally got kicked in the ass with about the 60th round of IBM offshoring-related layoffs of the recession.
Been unemployed doing freelance stuff here and there were I could find it...but am for the most part, apparently "Very Overqualified" for any job opening in a city where there is still a 9.8 unemployment rate and a busted real estate market...with no end in sight.
At this point, I'm seriously thinking of chucking the whole thing and moving back to Alaska and starting from scratch. All the academic honors and the textbook career paths in the world won't keep you employed when all the large corporations are moving the accounting jobs to India....and all the controllers of small companies think you know TOO MUCH and might be a threat to their own jobs.
I'm thinking a career at Trader Joe's would be nice - just stand at a cash register wearing jeans and a Hawaiian shirt and be friendly to people. Because I am SO OVER corporate America.
The ironic thing is that, years ago, I passed on acceptance to a couple of very good PhD programs in history (one of them at Duke), thinking that academia was dying and it was gonna be 'all about business'. Probably would have ended up a tenured professor of history somewhere and would be happily researching some obscure era of Russian history even as we speak. Instead, I've been bored as hell in a so-called 'lucrative' field I hated for a couple of decades...and have now been offshored out of the market.
So much for 'being practical'.
