Priorities

I've got to get my grades up.

Just heard today in class an interesting theory regarding airline hiring (read my sidebar: I'm a pilot). They furloughed a bunch of people after 9/11, which means they temporarily fired them. They tell them to go on an unpaid long term vacation, and they might get called back up. Now they're calling up a lot of those people and asking them to come back.

To illustrate what's going on, take one of my professors from last year. She was a pilot for a major airline company (you've heard of them, trust me) and was furloughed. She came to UND and became a professor, teaching a groundschool. She had two kids. She started a life around this town. Then they called her recently and she said that no, she wouldn't go back. She's comfortable here and the airline lifestyle, where she would be gone for days on end, lots of travel, exhaustive, that's not conducive to where she is right now. And this is happening with a lot of pilots who were furloughed after 9/11.

So everybody is looking for pilots and not finding them. This filters down as larger companies hire from smaller companies, and eventually the smallest companies look at people like me, who are in flight school and only a year or so from being done. A regional airline recently told UND that they would hire UND-trained pilots at a minimum of 300 hours in an airplane logged. This is a very low number, about half to a third of what UND pilots generally need to get hired, and about a third to a fourth of what pilots outside UND need to get hired. There's further talk about Headhunting us too. Actually looking at the grades of Juniors and Seniors, talking to their flight instructors and pre-hiring them in anticipation of their graduation. Possibly even paying the remainder of their costs.

All this means that I have a serious motivation to get my grades out of the gutter, and fast. And that I've got prospects. If I knew today that I could leave the day of my graduation for someplace better (I've had Boston on the mind lately, and I don't know why), I'd literally set a countdown clock to my diploma. I'd drop my second major. I'd take 20 credits a semester. I'd do everything I could to expedite that and go work for that airline, and when I got there, I'd be their best employee yet, because they took me off this damned tundra wasteland. I want very much to be a productive and contributing member of any society other than North Dakota.

TRH