Care to take a guess on what my least favorite word in the world is? Oh, good. You’ve read the headline.

I’m starting to think I’ve heard the word “overqualified” in the past five or six years than most people hear it ever, and I’m at the ripe old age of 32.

It all started when I set out on the path to become a museum educator. I started volunteering at a planetarium when I was eighteen. I got to help build rockets for the rocketry lab. I learned photography and slide construction so I could help build shows. I learned how to program the computer that ran our shows. I even hid out in the catwalk behind the dome and fixed a special effect while listening to a freshman astronomy lab. If there was a way to get involved, I did it. I was too new to do much more than run school shows and answer brief questions, but that was all right. I loved my work.

I moved on to become a demonstrator and interpreter at a nearby natural history museum, and then again to be an instructor at a regional history/science museum. I was doing my teacher prep program at that point, and my head was bursting with ideas for educational programs for the museum. When I went to the director of the education department and asked if I could throw something together, she was only too delighted to let me.

From there, it was attempt after attempt to land an internship, all the while gearing up to apply to grad school. In the same week, I was rejected from the program I really wanted to go to, rejected as a candidate for the director of education at a children’s museum that had pretty much courted me through the entire process (A gentleman was on both the grad school and the museum’s committee’s. I wondered if he knew during my director interview that I was not going to be allowed in to the graduate program.), offered an internship with a very well-known program, and accepted to my second choice graduate program. I went off to grad school, where I learned about all facets of museum science and worked in a poorly-lit office behind the production room, churning out workshops and special events. I even researched and wrote the introduction to a planetarium show.

I became sick my second semester of grad school, a case of sinusitis that I was never able to shake off. I made it through my classes, and then moved home. Back home, I couldn’t land a job in a museum to save my life. I applied for another director of education job a couple of hours from home, but they wanted a development person, not an educator. The rejection letter was lovely. It had the bugbear virus attached accidentally. Heh.

What I was hearing from the museums, what I had eventually heard as why I didn’t get into the first program I applied to, was that I was overqualified. I was twenty-six years old, and had more experience than my interviewers, or was just too experienced for the jobs I was applying for. It was frustrating.

I stumbled. I’d planned on being a museum educator, and had never once considered I couldn’t become one. I tried out a new career, editing for a test publishing company. Despite my fantastic editing skills, it didn’t work out. I wasn’t happy.

I moved and fell back into education, my first love. It hasn’t really fulfilled me the way creating educational programs for the museum world did, but it’s helped…sort of. I’m about as far as I can go without taking on a role I don’t want at work…and now there are whispers that I’m overqualified to do any of my jobs at work.

In only eight years, I became overqualified for the museum education field. In two, I became overqualified to work in a tutoring center (where I do  teaching, administrative, and supervisory work). Now I have my sights set on what I hope will end up becoming my career, and I’m worried that I’ll become overqualified there within five years. In fact, I’m moving really slowly in teaching myself their concepts in the hopes of trying to delay that once I finally figure out how to break in (which is proving to be a nightmare in its own right).

What do I do? I know I’ve put the plea out before, but I seriously need a mentor. Preferably one involved with educational media and curriculum development. Maybe someone else can find the answer I seem to keep overlooking.

Posted by Rebecca in Uncategorized