Personal Woes and Advice 3

[Dire Moose]

So I just found out that the museum isn't keeping any of its summer technicians, and I'll be out of a job at the end of August.

I've applied for eight other jobs, which is all I can find in paleontology. It's a really limited field as jobs go, and since it's so competitive, I doubt any of them are going to work out and I'm pretty sure I'll just wind up moving back in with my parents until I can get another temporary position next summer. The only positions that I seem to qualify for are temporary seasonal internships designed for undergraduates working toward a master's degree, which leads me to my next point.

Getting an actual full-time permanent job in paleontology is practically impossible without a master's degree, which I cannot get due to GPA issues. I'm not sure entirely what my GPA is since I finished two degrees, one with a 3.17 and one with a 2.972. However, the latter is closer to the truth since it includes some transfer credits from the former, and since most graduate schools calculate GPA using the most recent years and my best years were the earliest ones, even a 2.972 is probably better than what they'll calculate. Every school I've looked at has a 3.0 minimum GPA as a requirement to get into their program, which means I'll need to be at least a few points above that to compete. Even if I go back to school full time (which I can't due to lack of money), I will probably need around a full year of really high grades to undo the damage. I have heard that there are universities abroad that do not use a GPA system, but I doubt they'd let me in after looking at my grades either. And experience isn't likely to offset it as it isn't the same as academic credit from an administrative bureaucracy's perspective. So it would appear that getting a master's degree is never going to be a possibility.

I can't switch to another field either; although my two degrees in biology and geology would appear to give me a wide range of possibilities, all of my coursework and practical experience is geared toward paleontology. I submitted at least 50 different job applications to environmental consulting firms, oil companies, and the like over the last year, but none of them even called me back.

So I really have no idea what to do from here. My experience has apparently trapped me in a field I cannot possibly hope to succeed in thanks to my screwing myself over in school.