Next Monday at 10am will be my last ever University seminar. This is quite a sad occasion for me, after this there is no more taught education! I suppose I could do another taught MA, but I doubt I will. We will be spending two hours in total, firstly going over another student essay line by line on the British responsibility for the First World War (if he bothers to turn up!), before turning to the famous July crisis of 1914. It will be a strange feeling coming out of that room, in some ways the taught learning process started with my first day in primary school and in a week it all ends D: fuck me.
After that all I have to do afterwards is write my dissertation of 12,000 words (same de facto length as my BA undergrad dissertation), and I have already completed a fairly comprehensive 4,000 word research proposal to get the process underway. I know what I need to do in terms of reading so am not too worried. I have an excellent supervisor too (a true master of his field) so I couldn't really be in much of a better position. It does not have to be submitted until September, so looking for work before then will be tricky. Graduation isn't even till December! Yikes.
Guess I need to start thinking about my future then! Although I'm going to put off wading through horribly written and confusing job applications for as long as possible, as there are few things so depressing. HR speak is like fucking martian sometimes! My supervisor really feels I should be looking to do a PhD but there are so few job opportunities in modern historical academia for military historians. This means that funding will be almost impossible to get as any research proposal I do submit will be despised, and even if I did somehow manage to fund and complete the course there would be no employment waiting for me at the end. These days its all about culture and gender! I'm sure this trend will alter in future, but I do not know when nor how long it will take so cannot afford to wait around. I still have every intention of going on with my education, I just doubt I can turn it into a career. If only I had been born 40 years earlier!
