Career choices

[Crystallyne]

Hi. I was wondering how everyone ended up choosing their particular careers (if you have one, that is [img]tongue.gif[/img] ) Especially Risu-chan. I am in awe of your technical knowledge. I'm speaking as a second year college student who still hasn't chosen a major yet *sigh*.

Oh, and Crisis? What major are you going for out at Wellesley? (sp?) How did you know which one you wanted?

PS: Carole Ann, I really really like the new layout for your blog. [img]cool.gif[/img] Not that the old orange one wasn't nice, but how do you get cooler than Cain (in a lovely backdrop of blue) [img]wink.gif[/img]

[cutelittlekitty]

Well, i started off as an english major, since i wanted to be a writer. but then i realized how competitive the market for authors is, so i switched to educaiton. i'm in my third year of college right now. i plan on teaching college eventually, but i'm going to start off with high school. right now, i'm focusing on secondary education with a double major in math and english. i knew i liked english, and languages in general. the way we communicate is fascinating [img]smile.gif[/img] i discovered i liked math in my first year of college and added it as my second major. i'm one of those weird people who thinks math is fun. but i prefer algebra/trig. i'll be starting calculus III in the fall semester and i don't like calc as much. as for teaching as a career, the hours aren't bad, the pay is enough to live on, and i like helping people learn. over the summer i've been working as a private math tutor for a sixth grade, home schooled girl. my boss at the college i attend got me the job last spring. when college starts up again i'll be tutoring at the college too.

don't worry about not finding a major yet. one of the other students in the teacher education program i'm in went to college for 3 or 4 years before deciding to focus on teaching. and lots of other students are choosing teaching as a second career after having done other work for years. just keep taking different classes and you'll find something you like.

Kitty

[speakerofthedead]

Career choices... *laughs* Yup, today is the day I get my GCSEs back. But I have a fairly good idea of where I'm going, mainly because of my brother. I'm guessing that's not a good thing.

[tenjou_sama]

Career...career...haven't exactly decided on that (my dad wants me to be nurse...he keeps talking about the nurse shortage and how the pay will be good. I don't like nursing! I like computers! XD) I'm planning on majoring in computer science, but who knows. Something life altering can happen and I may want to be a space monkey or something [img]cool.gif[/img]

Carole Ann, I really really like the new layout for your blog. Not that the old orange one wasn't nice, but how do you get cooler than Cain (in a lovely backdrop of blue)

<font size="2" face="Verdana, Helvetica, sans-serif">LOL. And here I was thinking I was the only one who looked at my Blog [img]cool.gif[/img] The orange one was OK, but I only really liked it because of the picture I used ^^ Orange isn't really my color. Now blue...there's a nice color ^_^ Mix it with Cain and you've got a winner XD

[Lamasu]

heh - career [img]tongue.gif[/img]

I have a degree in archaeology and languages of the ancient near east - so as you can guess I am not an archaeologist nor am I an epigrapher - for starters - the pay is not so woderful and there are just not many descent jobs in that particular area and to top it all my area of obssession (Mesopotamia: Babylon and Assyria) is in Iraq - so... meh [img]tongue.gif[/img]

Instead I kinda ended up as a Belly dancer - how did I get there? aaahhh.... hmmmm... veeery good question - I have no idea. it kinda happened to me. I took classes and swore I will NEVER do that for a living, then I got a bit tipsy in a restaurant and they didn't really have a dancer but I had a scarf and I stood up and danced and then the manager offered me money ... it was all downhill from there.

I hated working in restaurants so I moved to Weddings, Bar Mitzva and other assorted parties.

like most jobs in life I got a bit bored so I started teaching the dance - so now I also teach.

but it is a lonely life so I got a part time job in a library - its very cool and everyone is mad and eccentric and oddly I prefer that to the glamour of shaking my funkey stuff - I am also surounded by books all day... mmmm.. nice.

I'd drop the belly dancing - only the money is kinda nice - I don't do a lot of parties these days but when I do they bring in a nice sum.

ah yeah - and I am a mother - thats the best job of all for me (yay! raising the next generation anime fan - he loooooves Utena - good boy [img]biggrin.gif[/img] ).

[jadey]

hmmm so far im planning on majoring in art. and maybe a minor or in english. cuz i draw and write. im writing a book right now...its still in its early stages its bout 200 pgs long but i still havent gotten to the middle yet >_>...

hehe i think i picked the easiest major...art has like no requirments (at least at Uconn and URI this is true). which is good cuz ill be able to focus on art without all the mumbo jumbo...but suxs cuz of all the ap course im taking in highschool that i dont need. but oh well it'll make me look good for college.

[Risu-chan]

O_O Wow, a professional belly dancer! And I thought my job history was convoluted... I haven't done anything nearly that interesting though. ^^;;

Here's my "how I learned to survive computers" war story, for Crystallyne who asked for it...

I knew I wanted to be an English major, because I knew I loved words, whether reading or writing. Of course, I thought that being an English major would teach you how to WRITE. Boy was I wrong. Everything I learned about writing I learned from my 6th grade grammar teacher, Mrs. Reed. College was an expensive piece of paper given in exchange for the two principles of "we extort money from you in exchange for a title to put after your name, and without that title nobody in the country will hire you for a serious professional job, so fork it over" and (in the case of the English degree) "you get your degree in exchange for learning how to speak academese, accept professors' orders to invent and write about wild unfounded assumptions about horrifying things Hawthorne's mother must have done to him to make him write the Scarlet Letter, and learning how to write to please each individual professor with no beginning-of-class cues to work from and a whole lot of undirected on-the-job learning."

Who me, bitter? Heck yeah... especially since I was also a theater major; the theater major was VASTLY more useful and practical. Unlike the English major, my theater work involved making things on a schedule with a budget, working with other people toward defined goals, and understanding how to balance life and required work and entertainment, all of which have been far more valuable to me than anything I got out of my English classes.

But because I was a double English and theater major without an education certificate, for about three years I thought I'd majored in pre-McDonalds. I was working 5 part-time writing and tutoring and secretarial jobs simultaneously in the hopes that one of them would turn full-time. I complained about it at a local writers' group, and one of the other members said, "You know, my bosses are looking for a technical writer." And the rest is history.

When I went to work for Skip's bosses, I knew Macintoshes. In other words, I knew the one operating system they DIDN'T use. But because I'd been singlehandedly responsible for a LOT of the work done in publishing my college yearbook, they gave me the job, because they wanted someone with professional publishing experience. Moral of the story: Your extracurricular activities and your internships REALLY ARE more likely to get you a future job than a string of As in your classes are. They wouldn't have hired me with just the English degree. They almost hired me *despite* the English degree, because the boss knew the difference between writing for essays (which is what English majors are taught) and writing for the business world (which is what technical writers have to do).

Anyway, that job was where I learned that I COULD learn what it took to survive in a heavily technical environment -- even though nobody there really gave me credit for having done so. During the five years I worked there, I taught myself how to take apart and put back together just about any computer hardware on the planet because I had to build my own test machines. Then I taught myself installation and testing and system administration procedures because I had to run the systems myself because nobody would bother to explain the software to me in order for me to document it. @_@ (Then they noticed that I was finding bugs they hadn't noticed, and made me part of their testing staff officially... actually, they made me their FIRST testing staff member; then they hired more of them. Up until then there hadn't been a QA department...)

You can kind of tell from my description above that there were some serious structural flaws with their business operating model, can't you. ^^;; I wasn't too surprised that they weren't making as much money as they needed to survive, and they laid me off (with about 30 other engineers and salesmen) in 2001. But at that point, they'd given me the all-important "first real job" item to put on my resume.

I'd been applying to the local university before I applied for Skip's job. I never got a single interview. Five years later, though, I had an item on my resume that said "technical writer, web master, interface designer, and product tester for..." -- and then I got interviews for every job I submitted an application for. Two of them made me job offers on the same day; I was really glad to get the second, because I really hadn't wanted to have to take the first, but this was just a few days after September 11 and I was thinking "all right, the economy's going to go to hell and so is the job market so I HAVE to take the first offer I get." I turned out to be more right than I wanted to be, but that's a different story...

So here I am, happily employed as a full time tech writer, when if you'd asked me what I wanted to do in college, I would have been HORRIFIED if someone had told me I'd be making a living writing about computers. I was *going* to be the next Anne McCaffrey or Mercedes Lackey, you see, and the five part time jobs were just to make enough money to live until someone noticed me and started publishing me. But the problem with that scenario is that I had no health insurance and I had too many other jobs to have any free time for writing!

And I also thought I hated computers. I found out that what I actually hated was programming. I still hate programming anything more complex than HTML or shell scripts. Life's too short for me to learn programming. I leave the programming to the people who have the inclination for it. What I am is a power user -- someone who knows how to get the maximum potential out of programs that someone else has written, and who sees computers as an essential tool to be used to make *something else,* rather than an end in themselves. And there's just as much market for power users as for programmers -- perhaps more so; power users see computers from multiple levels, whereas programmers see them from the inside out and newbies (or business presidents) see them from the outside in. So I've made myself the person who can translate between the language spoken by programmers and the language spoken by the rest of the world -- and it's good stable work that pays reasonably well and takes advantage of things I do well anyway. So this IS actually my best-suited job, as opposed to my "dream job" of manga translating which just isn't as reliable an income... and if you'd told me when I was a junior in college that I'd find myself a full-time technical nonfiction writer in ten years, I would have cried myself to sleep for a week and probably tried to slit my wrists or something.

The person I was then couldn't imagine being the person I am now -- but it turned out OK anyway, because somehow I stumbled through figuring out the differences between what I liked about writing and computers and what I hated about them, and then found myself a job which uses the things I like and am good at. I think that's the best way available to find a career path that actually suits you: become able to identify which aspects of which tasks appeal to you, and find something that matches it.

Don't get me wrong. Career choices are some of the hardest choices to make in your life, and the better you understand both yourself and what potential employers want, the happier you'll be in your eventual position -- and it's not easy to figure out both ends of that. But here's a list of things to think about, and examples of how I personally answered them, so you can see how the answers aren't strictly tied to the medium of "there can only be one job that suits you" (which was the mistake I made in college) as much as "describing options among a range of similar writing-based jobs":

--Do you like working with other people, by yourself, or some of each?
(I'm a some-of-each person. Tech writing means I type by myself a lot, but I also go talk to people to answer questions a lot. Fiction writing would have been purely internal, and reporting would have been almost purely external.)

--What is it that you like about the field you're most interested in?
(I'm both an artistic type and an analytical type. The artistic side says "I want to be making things and helping people." The analytical side says "Nice fantasy world, Van Gogh, but someone has to pay the rent." Fiction didn't pay the rent, and neither did part-time newspaper work. Tech writing does -- and most of the time I CAN leave it at work, go home, and have free time to do my hobbies like translating. If I were a manager or a lawyer, I'd be paid more, but I'd have less free time, and I'm not willing to trade "more pay" for "less time.")

What is it that you DISLIKE about the field you're interested in? And what trade-offs are you willing to make between what you like and what you dislike?
(Tech writing about computers is just not as creative as I wanted it to be, and computers are a tool, but not something I'm *inherently* interested in. I seem to be good at explaining them to people, and it pays well to do so, and I like the "I'm not a manager" part. But this really isn't my "dream" job. I just admit to myself that my "dream" job is better off staying as my hobby, because it doesn't pay as well or have as reliable medical and retirement benefits as my "practical" job. Technical theater was also a good way of combining my creative and analytical sides -- plus there are A LOT more jobs for theater technicians than for actors; most people want to be ON the stage, so if you know you want to be BEHIND the stage putting things together, you can get a lot more job offers -- but unfortunately the eye surgery I had in college has left me effectively night-blind, which means I can't get a real theater tech job anymore because I won't be able to see what I'm doing when walking around in the dark behind the scenery. But I might have done that if I hadn't had the eye surgery and technical writing hadn't worked out... because it also hits my personal job-requirement high points of "some work together, some work alone, both creative and analytical, you can go home and have hobby time, and there are reasonable job prospects." There's just a physical reason why it's not an option anymore.)

...So that's my incredibly long-winded attempt at condensing down the past 10 years of life experience into a really long rambling post. I wish that someone had tried to explain real life to me while I was in college; no, the guidance counselors were all about "you can be whatever you want to be." Which is nice, but doesn't give you any help in deciding the nitty-gritty nuts-and-bolts way of choosing which of the "anythings" you might want to be are actually a good thing for you to work at becoming.

So I hope this gives folks an idea of how to start asking yourself the questions that will lead you toward where you want to go, because I only tripped over them completely by accident, and I wish someone had given me a clue that the questions existed or that there really was more than one career path which might hit the *types* of work I like to do rather than the *specific job titles.*

...^^;;;;;; Done rambling now... sorry!

[jadey]

whoa.....blinks eyes...you can definetly tell you are a writer lol. thats good advice though. i know prollly halfway through college ill prolly change my ming and become like a math teacher or something. but i figure as long as i always have some kinda of goal ill be set.

lol on a side note. u can always tell who got A's on long essays and stuff. Myself im a multiple choice person. I have to have options but quick and easy answers.

my mom....definetly an essay person. when she lectures us its a full body paper. with an itro..arguments supporting evidence and a conclusion lol. they last a long time so i try not to get in trouble.

[yukawai]

erm, firstly, I wanted to became a writter, like most little girls wanted. Then I figured two years ago that thre was a lot of a too muhc ocompetition and that anyway I couldn'T -realy- let my imgaination on a roll since there is too much contreintes you gota follow and all. Then, lately, I've been thinking about psychologist becaue I realy realy realy like analysing people and the history of human mind and how it works and how it doesn't and just to dwell on such things makes me estathic. But then again, I'm now facing a big problem since I realy realy can't stand depressed people. If someone is sad, it'S okay. Depressed for a while, okay too. But when someone is depressed for a stupid reason or none at all (means I mostly think only a death in the family or friends is a "valid reason to be sad for about two weeks") I want to punch them hard in the face ^^* so I doubt I could get along troubled people

This leaving me to my other new obies; drawing, music and computers. An artist isn't much of an outcome, and I hate being presed by due dates or anything. That mostly leaves computer... I found way to express musylf in comps, and I can draw and make music by computer too, so that's cool. But I'm still unsure. I can't procrastinate forever telling myself "youre still young, you have time" but anyway, I'll wait for a illumination or just follow life to see I guess ^^;;


Risu: you gives realy great advices I think, thank you ^^

[Crystallyne]

Wow 0_0

Thanks, Risu-chan. That is actually very, very helpful. You're right, none of the college advisors really give you practical common sense ideas. I used to be under the delusion that all I had to do was find the one perfect job that existed out there waiting for me, but the advisor did actually tell me to try to be more open-minded.

@Lamasu: Wow, a belly-dancer. How cool is that! You must be very physically fit, though. Do you exercise all the time? (I wonder if I'd like working at a library? hmmmmm)

@Alai: What's a GCSE? *ignorant me*