Visualizing Your Goal

This Friday I went and visited with Skip Paznokas (yup, that's his name) he's the guy in charge of science majors who want to teach high school sciences. I had heard about this opportunity at another university called a Masters in Teaching and wanted to see if it was an option here at WSU.
Basically a Masters in Teaching is the golden ticket for me...the cake with all the icing on top. With a MIT (that's short for Masters in Teaching) I would be able to get a BS in Chemistry, without having to take all those crappy, waste of time (no offense to any Ed. Majors out there) education classes, and then spend one concentrated year earning my teaching credentials and wind up in the end with not only a BS in Chemistry but a Masters degree to boot. I'll be it it's not a masters in Chemistry but that doesn't matter, just the fact that it's a masters in anything is enough to make me more marketable and bump me up a pay grade. I will be doing a Chemistry Endorsement for my MIT which means I have to take one more Biochemistry class (the lab corresponding with the lecture I took) and then I'll be set. Skip also recommended doing a general science endorsement, so that I can teach other classes too. But he said that I can always add on endorsements as I go. This was good news because the general science endorsement would require I take more classes than I really have time for...classes like astrology, and geology and who has time for those?1?!
So this is good news and bad news. It means that I definitely know what I'm going to do with my life and have laid out the breadcrumbs to follow the right path but it also means that I'm definitely going to be in school for five...count em' people...five more semesters. Which sucks. I'm really ready to be done with school now. I'm tired of the constant studying and the endless string of busy days and no fun. But don't start panicking now people...I will not give up. I (well, Brian had a part in it too) have made this decision to get my degree and not give up until it's finished, so I'm not going to give up. I promise. It just feels sometimes like we're stuck in this no-man's-land between being kids and being adults. Because no matter how old I am, if I'm still in school somehow it doesn't really feel like I've grown up. And I want to grow up, I really do. I want to finally get out of this state of being and become that person I was destined to be. It just appears that it is going to take me a little bit longer than expected.
But that's okay, because when I'm all done with this it will be worth it. Stacey and I were talking about all this is other day and she said "just think about all the paper work you and Brian will be hanging on your walls...". And so I guess I can hang it all up on my walls, and looking at it I'll be able to remember and (hopefully) be happy about the journey that I took in getting there.