What is my dream career?

The last couple weeks have been interesting....

I met with my lab supervisor K-lynn whom I worked with before when I studied abroad on male-male competition study. The project was to score recorded songs of the critically endangered Regent Honeyeater. Although I just sat at a desk all day it was kind of fun listening to the songs and separating each piece. Unfortunately the program kept freezing and I kept losing all of my work. In the end she had me help fix some issues with the male-male competition project I did in 2009. Apparently I was not very precise when I scored all of the videos and there were a LOT of things to fix. After three days of constantly fixing things and re-running the analysis I had finally fixed all of the problems. My next job is to go through the data and see if we can find any possible significance which would be awesome! I'm glad I came back to fix it!

While talking with K-lynn I also started questioning what I wanted out of all this uni work. We talked about having kids while doing Masters/PhD and, although she had her daughter during her PhD, she strongly advised against it. I told her if it came down to career or family I would pick family and she said it would probably be best to at least wait till doing a postdoc. This got me thinking...I'm in no hurry to have kids, but I don't think I event want to do a postdoc! I want to work with animals on a day to day business not just stay at uni forever.

I started questioning what I really wanted and then I found out that my dream job as a Tiger Handler at Dreamworld was hiring (no I can't apply - I don't qualify). This was a blatant reminder that this was why I was here and that I want to be a tiger handler! To do that however, I don't have enough animal handling and big cat experience. I don't really want to be stuck having to do significant research my whole life, but I do want to work with people and animals on a day to day basis with the ability to do research. As a tiger handler at Dreamworld I can work hands on with tigers while also helping in educating the public on them. Also, I feel this would open up plenty of opportunities to use research to help find ways of learning more and improving the conservation of tigers. I don't really need to have a PhD to have that job so am I pursuing the right things?

In the end I realized I wanted the PhD just to be able to achieve as much as I could, do research worthy of such a degree, and to open up options for research or doing postdocs later. After talking to a friend working in research at the Chicago zoo and my Master's supervisor I now feel very confident that if I want to pursue the PhD, but in the meantime I want to try to also get as much volunteer and animal handling experience that will help me get to where I want to be.

Surprisingly there is a huge obstacle amidst all of my career pursuits....Matt. After spending a lot of time here Matt is really not too keen on Sydney. The traffic is bad, there's a lot more cigarette smoke than he's used to, and the list goes on. I'm not too sure what will happen in the future, but for the moment I don't think Matt will want to stay and live here. Hopefully in the end we will find a situation that works for both of us and I'm secretly hoping he'll fall in love with Brisbane where Tiger Island is.

In the mean time we have definitely had some fun times with friends! We hung out with my uni friends for my friend Elayna's birthday BBQ which was a blast. That same day we went to have dinner with the Mackie's at their place. Lachie Mackie I knew when I studied abroad here and now we are in the same church ward! His wife is an American from Montana/Utah and we have loads in common which led to a very fun and humorous evening. I'm sad I haven't had the time to go visit many other friends around Sydney, but I'm glad some awesome friends are nearby!

That's it for us! I now get up at 5am to workout every morning and get some work done before uni work. Also, with our spare room as my new study area I can easily get work done and still set aside time for watching my favorites shows with Matt every night. Things have been stressful, but there are always some good times as well.