While gobbling a stack of letters in the pigeon holes looking for mine in Hanif's room I was approached by one of the lecturer who happened to be my acquaintance. In a glimpse I could see she was a bit tense not as in her usual routine. Me being me I couldn't help myself from not to say hi and ask how's-your-day kind of questions to her. And there it goes, before I knew it I found myself in the middle of hot conversation about how hectic life as an academia is.
She went on uttering descriptively about how life was when she was in the ministry doing out-patient works and the likes. How the concentration then was only revolving around the well-being of the patients without having had to think the hustles and bustles of the students clinic supervision, lectures and the list goes on. At first, it seemed as if I concurred with all her points of view. It was exactly the same as what I experienced during my time in the ministry. And then, it struck me when she suddenly asked for my opinion in regards to the comparison between academic life and ministry life.
As I was scribbling my head trying to get my points straight and clear without compromising my manners, I replied,
"I never think of my shifting from the ministry to the academic is a wrong choice. I'd rather to look at it as my adulthood leap towards maturity. Although, of course the post-graduate scholarship is not as much as in ministry's candidate and the promotion is not as time-based as in the ministry, that is not my option to go back to the ministry. I have made my mind then and either it was a bad or good call I have to work the best out of it".
Of course you can always go back to serve under the ministry which also means your grade will be minus one from your cohort colleagues. For instance, your grade will be U51 while the other fellow colleagues enjoy the U52 grade. What makes you then. A second class specialist?
So, I think these comparisons between this and that should not be something that bother us to the point of considering other alternatives. It is good to compare to find solution to the betterment. But, to compare and run away, to me that is ungrateful. Life is not always about money and materials, it revolves more than that which involving gratitude, gratefulness and passions. I believe most of us who left the ministry and become academias have had a concrete reasons why you did so. Unless if you did it just to get rid of the abundant works of fillings and extractions, well, I guess you started in a very wrong foot.
