Career choices

Feb 25 17:42 UTC 1998

While talking with another grexer who is wondering how to choose a major, a
college, and a career, I started reminiscing about how I ended up in my
career.  Now I wonder how other grexers have decided what to study and what
sort of work to do.  How did you choose a major, and for those who are now
working, how did you end up in your present career (or past careers) - was
it all carefully planned out, did you drift into it, was it the result of a
summer job, or a complete accident?  If you switched careers, how and why?
If you could, would you choose the same career again or a different one?  If
you are not working yet, how do you go about choosing what to work at?

response 2 of 67:

Feb 25 22:57 UTC 1998

I'd been playing with computers off and on for years, by the time I got my
first modem when I was 14.  I started calling into a BBS one of my friends
was running, but got kind of bored of that.  Then somebody told me about Grex,
and I started playing around here a lot, and learning a lot about computers.
Eventually I got to the point where I was spending far more time playing with
computers than doing my homework.  Then I got a job working for the UM in my
senior year of high school.  My job itself was pretty boring, but they had
lots of cool computer stuff and a nice fast Net connection, so I started
spending most of my free time, and most of the time I should have been doing
homework, at the place where I worked playing with things.

Needless to say, when it got to the point of figuring out where to go to
college, I didn't have the grades to get into anywhere I was actually
interested in going.  That was ok, since I was feeling burned out enough on
school that I probably wouldn't have lasted long in college anyway.  I decided
to try to get a job doing something computer related, since it was an area
I was interested in and I had a lot of the skills to do it.  I got a job at
a company that does software and computer consulting for law firms, and
started doing all sorts of stuff there.  I was finding that what I was really
interested in was networking stuff, and especially Internet server and router
stuff.  I was starting to get to the point there where I wasn't interested
in a lot of the other stuff I was doing there, and then somebody that company
had been renting office space from knew the guy who owns the company I work
for now, and suggested that we talk to eachother.

response 4 of 67:

Feb 26 02:57 UTC 1998

  I know a number of people with degrees in computer science or computer
  engineering but I probably know more people working with computers who
  either have no degree or have a degree in a totally unrelated subject
  (for instance, forestry, film studies, english literature, music -- all
  people I've worked with..)

  When I left home to go to college I didn't really know what I wanted to
  study and hadn't even narrowed it down all that much:  computer science,
  physics, mathematics, and philosophy were my top contenders.  After a
  term or two of classes heavily loaded on the first three I decided to
  focus on computers but I wasn't really happy with the education I was
  receiving so after floundering for a while I quit school and took a
  computer job.  After six or seven years in various system administrator
  positions I got pretty bored with that and returned to school to complete
  my bachelor's degree in computer enginnering which is where I am now..
  I still haven't got the faintest idea what I'd like to do for the rest
  of my life though a couple of years in the work force have taught me a
  lot about what I *don't* want.  I'll report back if I ever *do* choose
  a career and have anything useful to say about how I arrived at the 
  decision.

response 6 of 67:

Feb 26 15:27 UTC 1998

As for a linguistics degree the fellow who taught my first programming class
has his degree in linguistics. Now he teaches about programming and computers.

response 8 of 67:

Feb 26 17:59 UTC 1998

Which fields require that you have a degree in them to actually work in them,
other than most teaching, and medical?   Is computer science anomalous in
allowing people to teach themselves the subject, or are there many other
fields that you can get into that way?  Theater?

response 10 of 67:

Feb 26 19:30 UTC 1998

My father also studied to be a chemical engineer (at Northeastern, MIT was
too expensive and he worked his way through), had a summer job in a bubble
gum factory, and eventually landed a job as a marine engineer checking ship
plans for the government during the war.  (He also checked plans for the ice
cream freezers on the ships).  But what he really enjoyed was writing, he
would have like to be a technical writer.  I have a few things he saved with
red ink all over them, so it looks like he made the best of his job.  After
the shipyard moved south without him, he worked for his brother's deli and
had a lot of fun writing up menus and advertising, then got a part-time job
at a bookstore owned by a friend (who had also studied to be an engineer, but
got into the retail business while selling magazine subscriptions as a summer
job.)   My brother fell into computer programming after dropping out of
college because he was too busy playing with computers.  After a few boring
civil service jobs, someone in his chorus offered him a job cataloguing the
computer library at a shoe factory, and he worked his way up, and eventually
got a degree in order not to waste the free tuition offered by another job.
(I think he still has an enormous collection of half-price shoes.)

response 12 of 67:

Feb 27 01:45 UTC 1998

Pardon my ignorance, but what is an Sc.D?  I've never heard of that...  Is
it like a Ph.D?

response 14 of 67:

Feb 27 07:22 UTC 1998

I have no career as of yet, and I really dont' know what I want to do.  It's
an interesting perspective.

response 16 of 67:

Feb 27 13:17 UTC 1998

Thanks!

response 18 of 67:

Feb 27 20:30 UTC 1998

I have a B. Eng. in Electrical Engineering.  While I don't work as an
engineer in that I don't design stuff anymore, I'd say that I'm still
working in the field.  What I do now is write articles about electronics
technology and the testing of electronics equipment.

response 20 of 67:

Feb 28 00:42 UTC 1998

I first got interested in computer in high school chemistry class.  The kid
next to me (Benno Bluminthal, now an oceanographer or marine biologist or
something like that) was doing archane scribblings an a scrap of paper.  I
asked him what he was doing.  He said he was trying to figure out how to write
the shortest possible program to print out a picture of the American flag.
I thought that this was a fascinating puzzle to be working on, and for the
first time got interested in computers.  Previously I'd figured they were only
good for managing payrolls and printing out invoices and boring things like
that.  So I took my high school's computer class the next term.  They had two
teletypes connected to an HP9000F someplace far away.  The class was tiny -
maybe ten kids out of the thousands in that school.  But I decided it was a
heck of a lot of fun.  So I went to the UofM to start studying computer
engineering.  Eleven years later I had three degrees in computer engineering
(bachelors, masters, PhD) and had discovered that doing computer research was
even more fun than just writing programs.  I'd published about a half dozen
papers on CAD, robotics, and computational geometry, all of which I got into
because I had a bent toward geometric stuff.  Since I was very happy as a
graduate student, I became a professor in the only PhD granting institution
that offered me a job - Texas A&M.  I rather liked being a professor, and did
lots of research and got a fair amount of research funding.  I started doing
AI systems and numerical simulations and oil-spill clean-up applications as
well as robotics, computer-aided design and CAD.  Meanwhile I taught courses
in programming, analysis, AI and computer graphics.  So I worked on everything
that caught my fancy, taught whatever needed teaching, and chased down just
enough funding to support a reasonable number of grad students.  I enjoyed
myself and I think I did good work, but I kind of missed the profile that the
deans were looking for.  The deans wanted people who'd focus on one area, pump
out lots of incremental papers on the same subject, and bring in as much
research money as they possibly could (even if they didn't have enough time
left over to actually do anything sensible with it).  They declared that I
"didn't hustle enough" and denied me tenure.  I decided that if there was a
University around that didn't want it's faculty to be either (1) teaching too
many courses or (2) chasing too much money, then there was probably no chance
of getting into them.  What I saw of corporate research labs struck me as
mostly grim - there are a few fun ones, but not many and those are hard to
get into.  So I decided that consulting was my best chance to have lots of
flexibility to play around with things that are interesting without being tied
down too much.  It works pretty well, but I'd kind of like to do some part
time teaching too.

response 22 of 67:

Mar 5 23:16 UTC 1998

I wonder if it is at all common in India for people to study some subject in
college and then work at something else.  I would guess not, it is not like
here where everyone goes to college and then decides what to do.

When I was little and people asked me what I wanted to do I said teach, which
made them happy. I have since discovered I am not a good teacher - not enough
patience, and I get bored teachging the same thing twice.
As child I collected postage stamps, not for the picutres but for the words.
In high school I was interested in sciences, but also took German and Latin
for fun, and Russian after school.  I was a science major in college.  I
enjoyed the chemistry theory but got sick in the labs.  At a summer lab job
I got bored trying to run someone els'e experiemnt which never worked. 
ANother summer job was copying titles of Russia articles over in Roman
alphabet, which for some reason I enjoyed.  I also took more Russian, German,
some Ancient Greek, and linguistics for fun.  I applied to grad school in food
wscience, botany, and Russian linguistics and got scholarships for the
Russian.  I did not enojoy being a teaching assistant, but kept translating
and continued in grad school.  I lived in former Yugoslavia for a while and
learned a lot about people, and a few more languages, and did dissertation
research.  There were no teaching jobs to apply for, so I kept translating
part time while writing the thesis (which I never finished), and am still
translating.  I have done a lot of chemistry, pharmacology, toxicology,
medical reports, and all sorts of technical miscellany, and find it a great
deal of fun, sort of like crossword puzzles.  I don't mind the erratic income,
and prefer to work at home, keep my own hours, and meet all sorts of
interesting people over the phone.  But it gets a bit lonely.  I would rather
read about other people's research than do my own, which can get pretty dull,
as well as make me sick from the chemical fumes.  I also run little
experiments in the kitchen (we made tofu and tortillas, from the whole seeds)
and the garden, and use my biochem degree to impress people in grex with odd
facts in the health and other conferences.
I never paid much attention to what I would do for a living while a student,
just took what was interesting.  I am using a surprising amount of what I
studied, but what is taught is not very related to what is applied.
        Are there other jobs that actually require a degree besides law,
medicine and teaching?  Do engineers all need a degree?
        How did people in health care choose their careers?  What percentage
of health care professional are more interested in helping people than in the
money?

response 24 of 67:

Mar 6 06:56 UTC 1998

  do they?  my brother works as a civil engineer for the army corps of
  engineers and I don't recall him having to go through a special
  certification procedure (other than holding a degree from MTU.)  he's
  taking the PE exam but I thought I was told that that was a seperate
  matter..