Define "work"

I think most of us can agree that we struggle with keeping balance between our work lives and our personal lives. I know that for most of my professional life, I’ve struggled with trying to have a social life of some kind while balancing a demanding job. (Is there any other kind of job?) So what happens when you throw grad school into the mix?

Mine is an unusual story. I’m in the weekend program for working professionals and I’m not working. I should qualify that statement. I’m not working outside the home and getting paid. I am working, however, at handling all the paperwork and legal documents that come with trying to sell a house in Florida and I am working at trying to find a new job. Trust me when I say looking for a job is a full-time job.

Every so often I go on the usajobs.gov website which posts the available jobs in the federal government and I may find one to apply for. It takes about two hours to complete one application. Despite uploading my resume, which I think is pretty clear, I must then turn around and answer anywhere from seven to 10 essay questions on the experience I have in various fields and how it correlates to the job I am applying for. By the time I complete one application my brain hurts.

It can be quite challenging to do reading and writing assignments for graduate school after completing 10 essay questions or running around looking for a notary public to notarize all the documents needed for a closing. Even though I’m not “working”, I find that I don’t do my homework until the evening. Just like my “working” classmates.

So how do I maintain balance? It’s like I’ve said for the last two weeks. Prioritize and sacrifice. Homework is a priority so it takes preference over my desire to go and see D.C. as a tourist. Hopefully, the Capitol will still be there once I graduate. And hopefully I’ll be “working” before I graduate.

Millicent

GPO versus AP style guides: keeping my mental sanity!

Do I use serial commas or not? Should I capitalize government and federal? What about Senate-confirmed appointments? Are those capitalized even when the title doesn’t precede the name? Is embassy capitalized? These are just a few drops in a bucket full of differences between the Associated Press Stylebook and U.S. Government Printing Office Style Manual.

The conundrum: keeping my brain from exploding from the laborious task of using the right styles for grad school and my government job (yes, I had to think twice whether to capitalize government in this situation!) When I started my job as a writer/editor for the Department of State’s Office of Inspector General, I had to forget everything I learned as an Army journalist whose bible was the AP Stylebook and learn to love GPO. My brain rebelled for a while and suffered migraine-like withdrawal. But eventually, the pain ebbed and like most change, I got used to it. However, that blissful nirvana came to a screeching halt when I started my second grad school course--public communication writing. All of a sudden, I was thrown back into the world of AP and forced to balance the teeter-totter of right and wrong between AP and GPO.

Fortunately, there’s a silver lining to this daily mental torture. Practice makes perfect, so constantly consulting both style guides not only keeps me on my toes, it also forces me to learn these differences. Eventually, I’ll only have to consult the books for uncommon style applications.

What happens when I’m done with grad school? Will I have to unlearn AP style once again? Hopefully by then I’ll have transitioned into a government job that shuns GPO and embraces AP. Meanwhile, I’ll stock up on Excedrin Migraine…just in case!

-Misha-