My dream jobs (sigh. . .)

Last updated on: February 9, 2016 at 4:39 pm by Jane the Actuary

My dream jobs (sigh. . .) 2016-02-09T16:39:55-06:00 Jane the Actuary

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Every now and again, a person or organization I follow on twitter tweets out job opportunities.

This time, I’ve got two jobs that are sitting in perpetually-open browser tabs, jobs that I keep looking at longingly, even though my resume’s far too thin to apply. But I’ll tell you about them, and then I’ll resolutely close those tabs, ’til next time.

Job #1: Research Analyst, Religion (International Surveys) at the Pew Research Center. Requires three years of experience in a research capacity, plus experience with SPSS, which I presume to be some kind of statistical analysis software. Plus, the job posting doesn’t explicitly say it’s a full time position in D.C., but it’s improbable that it’s not the case.

Job #2: OK, it’s not actually a job, but rather a fellowship, for the New America Fellows Program:

Our goal in the Fellows Program is to find bold, iconoclastic thinkers and to fund them for one to two years, long enough so that they can write a book, develop a series of articles, make a documentary, or work on another project that would be accessible to a broad audience and long enough to be able to build a real community among the fellows.

Yes! I would love to have the time, and the access to resources, to write a book. I even know what book I would write (imagining I had the skill set to write it, which mostly means the people skills to sit down with strangers who’d understandably be suspicious of a nerdy white woman): a series of in-depth profiles of honest-to-goodness poor people, that, combined with some data analysis, attempts to provide my own answer to the bigger questions of how to help. I’m thinking, for instance, of the efforts to bring grocery stores to “food deserts” and the report, afterwards, that, as much as the inner-city poor may not have easy access to grocery stores with fresh produce, they don’t actually have McDonalds at every streetcorner, either, and, in fact, their access to fast food isn’t any better than their access to produce — but their consumption of fast food has as much to do with the difficulty of preparing home-cooked meals when you’re poor, commuting long hours, etc., as the availability of ingredients. When I saw this, it seemed to me that no one was really talking to affected people except to hear what they wanted to hear. Or maybe I’m a dunce.

But, still! What’s your dream job?

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