Back to School...AGAIN!!!

So two days before Thanksgiving, I successfully defended my dissertation (yay!). My tome was unprecedented, I was told, in a number of ways and I was told by several of my committee members that they've highlighted numerous sections as things to follow up on in their own work. So overall, it was a fair success. That makes me Dr. Spencer now (or the Doctor :)). It was pretty eventful, especially since the very next evening at the Thanksgiving Eve service in the church I grew up in, my brother Jordan and I got baptized (I'm such a procrastinator!). Since then, Gilda's moved to working from home full time and I'm the house husband! In the meantime, I applied for lots of jobs.

Job prospects, however, are pretty bleak right now. Apparently it's the worst philosophy job market in quite a few decades. The number of listings is probably a quarter or less of its usual number and there are hundreds and hundreds of applicants for many positions (but fewer than two hundred job openings!). Not to mention that many higher-level junior faculty have decided this is a good time to move laterally to a different department - therefore saturating the market with (this time, more "experienced" and proven) applicants even further. This makes getting a first-time job extremely difficult, particularly if you're coming from somewhere which isn't named "Princeton", etc. Most jobs now have already been filled, offered, or narrowed down to a short list. Since no one's bit on any of my applications, I'm almost certainly not going to get a job for next year.

So what am I going to do next year? Well, I applied for the GTU in Berkeley for a Masters of Arts in Biblical Languages (a 2 year program, but where I can also take evening classes and other useful things). The GTU is a large affiliation of a number of member schools which feature everything from the evangelical to the Catholic to the way wacky Liberal to even non-Christian religions (you can even take classes at UC Berkeley and use their library when enrolled there). Today I received a letter letting me know that I've been accepted into the program and that I will be affiliated with the Dominican School for Philosophy and Theology - my first choice for primary school of affiliation (which means I have to take a certain number of classes from that school and will have one of its faculty as my advisor). So here I am, a PhD in philosophy going for an MA in biblical stuff. Yes, I am crazy.