Was this all just an extremely expensive vacation?

For two years now, it's been a fairly common refrain of mine. If you were with me at HEC or DU, you probably heard me say it at some point. If you read this blog regularly, you've probably "seen" me say it. I've thought it many times without saying or writing it. "If this doesn't work out, I could always go back to Taiwan..."

As the MBA finally draws to a close amid numerous frustrations and a monumental amount of stress, and as the job market for newly minted MBAs seems mostly confined to whatever they were doing before their MBAs, and as I try to be patient with somewhat promising leads that haven't led anywhere just yet, and as I came away from the past week in Jouy with something like a sense of closure over the whole thing, I found myself thinking about it all once again over the weekend. Then two things happened.

The first was that I did get a business job offer of sorts. You might think that would end any thoughts of going back to teaching, but, well, the job was selling insurance in Scranton. That's right, Scranton. The city my family has been trying to escape from since 1912 or so, the aptly cast setting of the American version of The Office, the city that escaped the withering pen of Billy Joel only because Allentown is a lot easier to rhyme...and so far, the only place where I can count on a job that would ostensibly be using my degree.

The second was something so obvious I must have chosen not to think of it before. If I did reapply for my old job, that wouldn't mean I would have to take it. (For that matter, there's not even a guarantee they'll take me back, though I'd be very surprised if they didn't.) If I did take it, I wouldn't have to stay forever and I could continue looking for other opportunities while doing work I loved.

Before I could talk myself out of veering from the path of progress, I bit the bullet and applied. And so it is that I find myself here at my laptop in Luxembourg, two years on and thousands of dollars and euros behind, pondering the possibility that I could wind up back where I once belonged and finding that I'm not all that upset about it. Well, I am in the sense that it does feel like a step backward. But my alternative two years ago would have been to always wonder if I should have gone back to school. As it is, at least I'll have the degree for future endeavors, if there ever are any available. Underpaid work that you love is better than well paid work you don't like, and it's much better than no work at all, which just might be better than selling insurance in Scranton.

Right, but will next summer really find me in Taipei using the macarena to teach the months of the year to a bunch of kids in green and yellow pajamas? Odds are something else will come along, and I do plan to keep looking. But given the level of frustration I've had to cope with over the past few months and the fact that it's not likely to end immediately, I had to have some sure thing out there to lean on. I also can't help thinking of all the nine-to-five desk jobs I've failed at in the past, and really wonder why I ever thought going back to that world was a good idea.