'home' again... now what?

Well, I've been back 'home' in Toronto, Canada for about two months now. My year in Amsterdam was truly the best year in my life. I learned a lot, met wonderful people, made amazing friends, and fell head over heels with the city. Now, after the whirlwind of visiting friends and family I hadn't seen in over a year, I'm finally settling in again to life in Canada and working on deciphering my fieldnotes and figuring out what I actually learned while I was away.

What I've learned so far, is that no anthropologist ever seems to come back from 'the field' (wherever that may be) feeling like they got everything they could have. So far, all my colleagues in the same situation say the exact same things. Mostly along the lines of, "I know that if I had been there for another month or so, I could have gotten much more done!" I just hope that I have enough to be able to write something worth reading, and interesting enough to present to the folks back in Amsterdam in the spring...

It would be really great if what I ultimately produce could be more than just interesting. It would be wonderful if my dissertation could actually be more than just pretty academic musings and be, dare I say it, useful. This is something that I think a lot of social researchers think about. I would be really proud if my research could have positive implications for policy making or something in the Netherlands, (how cool would that be?) but I'm not entirely sure how to make that happen...

While I have always thought that I would want to stay in academia - become a professor and wear a tweed jacket with the leather elbow patches, etc. - the course I am TA-ing this year, Public Anthropology, is encouraging me to weigh some other options. The reality is that at least half of all professional anthropologists (i.e. folks with the letters PhD after their names) end up working outside of the university. While I like the idea of a career where I could not only research and write but also to teach, the researching and writing bits ain't bad. There are lots of great research institutes (like the Meertens in Amsterdam) out there, in addition to local and governmental organizations who hire social researchers. While some of these organizations do have more of an academic bent to them, a lot of their work funnels directly into making positive, useful changes in policy and other areas of society. That's pretty cool.

These decisions and job applications are more than a year away from becoming a reality for me. In the meantime, I have lots of notes to sift through, interviews to transcribe, literature to read up on, and research to write (and edit, and edit, and edit...). But, when the time comes, non-academic job options are something to consider. Besides, I heard you're allowed to have the elbow patches on your tweed jacket once you have your PhD, whether you stay in academia or not...