question for the weekend

[kalmn]

marydell saw the questions being asked for the daily question, and came up with some better ones.

the one that caught my eye immediately was, why did you abandon the career plans you made in your early 20s?

me, i was very interested in medical anthropology, having a minor in bio and a major in anthropology comprising my bachelors degree. there were probably jobs available for people with only bachelor's degrees and a strong interest, but they all involved travel and being far far away from my rheumatologist. and my family. i got a job vaguely in the medical field (working at a plasma center) with the thought that i'd do that for a while and continue to work on medical things. [insert handwaving here] i was tired of school and didn't want to go to grad school immediately. then, the plasma center turned out, shall we say, not to be a great fit for me, so i left there and needed another job, in the "i will take nearly anything that pays money" way. a friend hooked me up with a job in computers, and here i am, sixteen years later.



i still have a vague theory that starts out 1) win the lottery, 2) get an mph (masters of public health) but as i don't buy lottery tickets, it may be a while.

you?

Comments

[snippy]

Plans...plans...I was supposed to have plans?

[marzipan-pig.livejournal.com]

I had tons of plans! And now I do something like those plans. Why is the question about abandoning the career plans instead of 'transforming' or 'adapting to fit life cicumstances'? I wanted to do research and then the field/program I went into turned out not to be a great fit for me. I found other stuff that was a better fit and interspersed it with direct services. Right now I'm in a really good fit research position; eventually this will end and I may do some kind of direct service work again.

[pameladean]

I always wanted to be a writer, but my mom had been telling me since I was eight and first expressed this ambition that I would "need another job to support my habit." So I went off to graduate school to get an M.A. and a Ph.D. in English and figured I would teach English to support myself.

I hated teaching with an unholy passion. The grad school's approach was basically "toss 'em at the students and see who survives," but I'm not sure a really good classroom management class would have helped. I just hated it. Also, though I loved graduate school and would happily have gotten a dozen Ph.D.'s, you can't get one if you don't teach, since it's a qualification for teaching. So I quit with the M.A. and became a secretary. (My mom also firmly made me learn to type, explaining that most modern publishers don't want calligraphed manuscripts.)

P.

[bibliofile.livejournal.com]

I almost didn't take typing, because I didn't want to be a secretary. Fortunately, I did take it -- and have even done office work, and well.

[pants-of-doom.livejournal.com]

There are no jobs in linguistics.

[kitryan.livejournal.com]

I actually stayed pretty close to on track. I may not have progressed as fast as I wished, but when I was 18 and starting college, I decided I wanted to be in theater. When I was about 20, I settled on costumes. Creativity, collaboration, not as much trig or drafting as scenery or lights, but lots of fun historical research. At 21 I decided to go to grad school, for Costume design. I did and I've since been a fabric dyer for a Broadway costume house and now an Assistant to the Resident Costume Designer at a regional theater. I'm working towards more work as the costume designer on shows and have designed at least one show every couple of years on my own. So, while I may have envisioned being a fabulous Tony award winning designer by this point, I am at a pretty reasonable place based on 20 year old me's expectations.

[tesseract26.livejournal.com]

i thought i would double doc in education and literature and found a school where girls actually got treated well. then i thought i would double doc in psych and sociology and do awesome feminist research.

turns out that i really, really do not want to get a ph.d. also, i really, really do not want to work in academia. i'm too pragmatic.

hence the current plan for a dual master's and the founding of a nonprofit that will do a bunch of cool stuff focused on making life better for women where i live.

[jinian.livejournal.com]

Bit of a class issue here, perhaps: I never made any plans back then, as I was too busy working.

[kalmn.livejournal.com]

ah! a good point.

[sageincave.livejournal.com]

My plan was to magically get into publishing. Without an English degree.

Needless to say, that didn't work out too well.

Part of me would like to go back to school for something more interesting than accounting (my last temp assignment revitalized my interest in Anthropology), but money is an issue. Plus, I never took my GRE, and now I'm kind of scared to.

Hey, you did Anthropology at Mac, right? Did you take classes from Jack Weatherford? I'm in the middle of two of his books now...would love to know what a class with him is like. :)

re: question for the weekend

[betonica.livejournal.com]

The GRE is not difficult - it's one of those things that is almost exclusively a test of your ability to take tests. Go find as many publications that have sample questions as you can, and do all the sample questions. Repeat a few times. Your score will be at least 100 points higher than if you hadn't "crammed" for the test.

Re: question for the weekend

[sageincave.livejournal.com]

Thanks for the good advice! Everyone carries on about how the GRE is so intimidating, but if it's like the old SAT, I should be fine. :)

[skylarker.livejournal.com]

I had kind of a vague notion of being a writer/illustrator and haven't given it up, although it's taken me a long time to firm it up.

[iraunink.livejournal.com]

In elementary school, I wanted to be anything other than an English teacher, doctor, nurse, dentist, or any kind of scientist.

In Junior High, I was exposed to journaling. I really didn't want to be an English teacher.

My first semester at college, I wanted to be a French teacher. Then I took a set and prop making class, and wanted to be a behind the scenes person at a theater. Then I decided that I wanted to be able to support myself, so I finally settled on Accounting. My first business class was great, it all clicked in my brain.

Right now, the Federal government pays me to not screw up American business. So I guess my career plans in my 20's are the exact opposite of what I am doing now.

[monstersocks.livejournal.com]

I'm totally not a Solid Gold (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solid_Gold_(TV_series)) dancer.

I hate academia, and as P.O.D. said, there are no jobs in linguistics.

I keep looking at public health and librarian programs, but, eh. I dunno.

[bibliofile.livejournal.com]

Just so you two know, UNC is developing (or it may already be launched) an online PhD program in public health. It may even be the world's first online PhD program. I only know about it because I know someone involved in setting it up.

[epi-lj.livejournal.com]

I had just completed my BScH and was going to do research with the lab I'd done my undergrad thesis with for a year and then hopefully have the spoons to dive back into it for a masters, likely pursuing some sort of future in academia, or perhaps research at a company. The "doing research" part was coming along (I did actually publish one paper with them). Then okoshun's Dad was diagnosed with terminal cancer, and she wanted to live closer to him so she could spend time with him before he passed away. So we moved to Toronto, and with my rocky educational record and only a Bachelor's, I couldn't land any of the research jobs. I got a job as a programmer for a small company (I would be the 8th employee), but then they were dissolved by their parent company just before we arrived, so we got here without any jobs, trusting we'd find something. So when a sysadmin job opened up, I took it, and that's where I've been since.

[rmnilsson.livejournal.com]

I never did. I'm doing pretty much what I knew I wanted to do at 22. And it's a really fun job.

[bibliofile.livejournal.com]

I was going to go into science, either ecology or chemistry or something, but you generally need to finish at least one college degree. As my friend Becky has said, junior year has been some of the best years of my life.

OTOH, I did work as a technical writer on computery things, a field which is very ability oriented and not (at the time) stuck on credentials. I made a living as a writer! Boring stuff, but fiction's for consuming not producing.

[bibliofile.livejournal.com]

Oh, and I should add that tech writing's the closest I've ever seen to applied (cultural) anthropology.

[abostick59.livejournal.com]

My early-twenties career plans were pretty much trashed by the incompetence as a mentor of my thesis advisor.

[hypatia-j.livejournal.com]

When I started college I wanted to either design spacecraft or do special effects for ILM. 4 years later, neither of those things seemed as interesting or likely.

[genevra.livejournal.com]

In high school, I took a jewelry making class, and decided that was what I wanted to do. I went to college, and majored in business so I could get the background to run my own store. Before the end of my freshman year, I had switched to an Art major, to work on the art portion of my jewelry. Sophomore year, I took an Art History class, and fell in love with it - I got completely sidetracked from the jewelry, switching to an Art History major.

Then I ended up leaving school for non-academic reasons, with 3 years in and no degree. Got a job in the real world working as an assistant in the accounting department of an office. I went to school part time while working, and got an AAS in accounting. I was planning to continue on for a bachelor's, but couldn't stand the management classes, so I dropped out of college for a second time.

In the meantime, I had started making jewelry in my spare time, and selling at cons and art fairs. I quit my accounting job and went to work at a jewelry store. I went through the graduate gemologist program at GIA, finishing up the studying and work for my last classes while my baby twins were napping. I'm going to take some manufacturing classes this fall, and get to work on making stuff to sell on etsy.

I've come full circle, and 23 years later, am doing what I wanted to do when I graduated high school.

[la-luna-llena.livejournal.com]

I had two desires:

1) to write, at first I thought international journalism but quickly abandoned that for creative writing because:
a. I kept getting awards for creative writing.
b. I read Georgie Anne Geyer's Buying the Night Flight (http://www.amazon.com/Buying-Night-Flight-Autobiography-Correspondent/dp/0226289915) and realized that international journalism is too life-threatening for my taste.

2) Then I had to make a living while writing, and I foolishly went idealistically towards the nonprofit world. I wanted to help people, but no thought for myself and getting more than next month's rents. I ended up either underpaid and overworked or just plain underpaid.

3) Now I still want to be a writer, but I'm learning to write more and more code and create that way too. My last creation has been 30 days of haiku on twitter: @30DayHaiku.

3)