Successful Midlife Career Change: Self-Understanding and Strategies for Action [Paperback]

Paula I. Robbins (Author)

Product Details

• Paperback: 278 pages
• Publisher: Amacom Books; New edition edition (October 1980)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0814475361
• ISBN-13: 978-0814475362
• Product Dimensions: 8.9 x 6 x 0.9 inches
• Shipping Weight: 15.2 ounces
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #5,571,147 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

More About the Author

Paula Ann Ivaska Robbins

I have always been a reader and a writer. Even at Teaneck High School, I was editor-in-chief of my class yearbook and of the newspaper, as well as a stringer for the Bergen Evening Record. But it was as an English major with immersion in great literature and constructive criticism from professors at Vassar that honed my skills.

Although the titles that I have carried in the many jobs that I have held since graduation were varied, writing has always been part of them. I had jobs as a career counselor at Radcliffe and Trinity Colleges. I went on to earn a M.Ed. in Counseling from Boston University and a Ph.D. in Higher Education Administration from the University of Connecticut (with a dissertation that turned into my first book, published by the American Management Association, Successful Midlife Career Change). I edited the catalog and program description flyers for the graduate programs at Fitchburg State College, where I was Assistant Director of the Graduate School, and at the University of Massachusetts at Lowell, where I was Assistant Dean of the Graduate School. During an interval between academic jobs, I was Director of Software Technical Writing for Computervision Corporation. After I was forced to take early retirement from U. Lowell in the recession of 1990, I became a medical editor at Carolinas Medical Center and passed the examination given by the Board of Editors in the Life Sciences, adding "E.L.S." after my Ph.D.

After I "retired" from several jobs, I co-published a directory of B&Bs for Unitarian Universalists (www.uurehome.com). I wrote two novels based on the lives of my Finnish grandmothers: Below Rollstone Hill and Nights of Summer, Nights of Autumn. Next came The Travels of Peter Kalm, Finnish-Swedish Naturalist, Through Colonial North America, 1748-1751, which garnered a favorable review in the Wall Street Journal. Purple Mountain Press also published Jane Colden, America's First Woman Botanist. I am currently working on an historical novel based on the life of Elias Lönnrot, the country doctor who compiled the ancient Finnish folk poems that he collected into the Finnish national epic, The Kalevala. I have just started on a new project with a co-author, Jean Woods, of a biography of Philadelphia botanist Mary Gibson Henry.