Back to Equilibrium?

The funding situation seems to have been ironed out for my thesis. I’ll be working 75% time as a contractor and 50% time as a grad student. Yup. 125% time…50 hours per week. Well, I suppose I already put that in with the evening and weekend babysitting I do for my data runs. The bad news is that my contractor vacation time accrues at only 50% time (true for anyone working anything less than 40 hours per week). The good news is that all of my other benefits are still in place.

Not sure if I’m happy with this, though. I certainly appreciate all the effort various people have made to make this happen, the upshot of which is that I don’t loose much of my salary. However, now I’m split between two companies, have to document that I work more, lose vacation time, and my tax withholdings will be all messed up (a couple years ago I came very close to owning money due to working for two different companies).

The worst part is that I’m not even sure that a PhD is what I want. I’m at that point where if I quit, I’ve wasted 2 years of my life, but if I continue, I’ll be miserable for the next 2-3 years. I’m not sure which is worse. Oh, and there’s the fact that I won’t actually use this degree when I’m finished that makes it all the more enticing.

I’m going to quietly put my resume up on monster.com and see if there are any good nibbles…