Career paths you considered and rejected

In My Humble Opinion
1

If you’re one of those people who knew what you wanted to be from childhood, this thread probably isn’t for you. But if it took you a while to decided, do share what options you looked at along the way.

When I was in high school, I figured I’d be a teacher because I didn’t want to be a nurse or a secretary and my unimaginative teen self thought those were the only options available in the late 60s/early 70s. It didn’t happen since I dropped out of college after my freshman year and didn’t resume studies for nearly 4 years. After retirement, I again thought about teaching, but by that time, my daughter was a teacher and her horror stories about students, parents, and administrators dispelled that notion pretty fast.

At one point, I thought being a real estate agent would be fun. I loved going thru properties when we were house shopping, so to do that and get paid?? Wow!! Till I stopped to think that first, it was sales, and second, it would require lots of evening and weekend hours. Another road not taken.

I had fleeting thoughts about retail and food service, but they flitted away pretty fast, too. The 26 years I worked as an engineer suited me, but the 4 post-retirement gigs as a mechanical drafter were even better. No meetings, no budgets, no decisions, just make drawings for the engineers. And no regrets about the roads not taken.

2

I was going to be an Electrical Engineer, went to Community College while working two part time jobs right after High School and did terrible.

So I joined the Navy to earn college money and after my 4 year hitch, I came home as was working full time with lots of overtime while taking 2 classes at night every semester. Planned to transfer to Rutgers in about 4 years as a full time student. Then as my friends started graduating from college and not getting jobs in Engineering as the Cold War had ended things were looking bleak.

I considered going into teaching. There were some 2 year degree options for a quick start. And I had about half the credits needed for that. But I dropped that idea fairly quickly in favor of programming. I was pretty good at coding and logic so it was a good fit. I would go into gaming or science programming.

Nope, that wasn’t reasonable but hey, according to lot of research in the job ads, the qualification for jobs as a COBOL or RPG business programmer was know how to code in the languages and be breathing.

So I went to a school for training in both and did great in the school and had a 30 year run as a Programmer/Analyst allowing me to retire a little early. I guess it worked out for the best.

3

I had wanted to be an airline pilot. I eventually gave up because of the high cost of training and my ADHD, sleep disorder and OCD making it near-impossible to get an FAA medical clearance.

Later on, I decided that fields like accounting were too boring or tedious. In hindsight, I wish I had gone for “boring.” There’s no need for a job to be fun, it just needs to pay the bills well and here I am still living paycheck-to-paycheck at age 36.

4

It’s not too late to train for a “boring” job. My daughter is closing in on 39 and she just left teaching for a completely different line of work and she’s loving it.

5

From age 6, to age 17, my intended career was in meteorology: specifically, I wanted to be a television meteorologist.

As I was looking at colleges, and considering the University of Wisconsin (where I did wind up going), I looked at their meteorology program, which is one of the top programs in the country. I went to a small Catholic high school, with a less-than-awesome education in math (our main math instructor was a dotty 75-year-old nun). When I discovered just how much high-level math and physics was required for a meteorology degree, I talked myself out of pursuing it (reasoning that my high school education had not prepared me sufficiently for that sort of coursework at the college level), and decided to major in marketing.

I’ve now worked in market research and advertising for 35 years, but I regularly thought about the “road not taken.” Probably over the last five years or so, as my career has become increasingly stressful, and as the advertising industry has become, frankly, toxic to its employees, I now often wish that I had tried for a degree in meteorology – it would have been a very different life path, but I think that, at this juncture in my life, it would have made me happier.

6

I wanted to be a medical scientist, and even trained as one. But I found my basic science research skills were mediocre at best, and I didn’t enjoy it. Ended up in Family Medicine instead. I did a few public health studies during my career, but mostly just practiced medicine.

7

Interesting point, I wanted to be an EE, I was very single minded about it. Working in a variety of companies and seeing different type of Engineers and Chemists at work, plus enjoying building and designing things and woodworking; I suspect I would have been happiest as a Mechanical Engineer.

I can’t remember why I got Electrical into my head. ME was probably a better fit.

8

When I was in business school, the go-to specialization for people who wanted a career that was boring but lucrative was actuarial science. It required a lot of statistics, and passing a series of examinations, but if one was math-oriented, and wanted to be able to be paid well to crunch numbers and have minimal interactions with co-workers, it had a lot of appeal.

(As I took a number of stats classes, for my focus on market research, I knew all of the actuarial science majors. Smart as hell, seriously nerdy. :slight_smile: )

9

I wanted to be a physician but instead became an English teacher in a boarding school for troubled (and severely, painfully undereducated) youth.

Both my parents were RN’s and I grew up listening to them talk shop. I developed this grand fantasy of being a small-town family doctor that had a clinic in an old storefront on Mainstreet in some tiny town in Montana or Oregon. I’d make house calls and do health clinics at the local schools and all the rest of the campy stereotypical things Lifetime movie doctors do.

Reality, of course, had other plans. I was a high school dropout and the idea of doing an undergrad in chemistry followed by medical school was too daunting. I did work as a caregiver for a decade and a half but got burnt out after switching from assisted living to hospice. I had a serious come-to-Jesus talk with myself, decided working as a wage slave while trying to raise my kids wasn’t really tenable, so went to school. I was 30. I figured there was only room for one Patch Adams in the world and going to med school in my mid-30’s would make me a laughingstock so I stuck to the humanities. I ended up earning 4 college degrees in history and planned to become a history teacher but sort of fell into this English teaching gig and, well, here I am.

10

In high school I thought being an entomologist would be cool. The guidance counselor mentioned that there were probably 6 openings for entomologists in the entire country.

11

I spent a good two years settling on a career change a couple decades ago, but throughout my life I considered everything from veterinary medicine, to various types of biology or chemistry, law, teaching, medicine, engineering. I have degrees in two of those things…

I’m quite content in engineering, and the overall field I’m in, but I’m still super restless about the actual work I do. I always want something more and haven’t quite figured it out, but certain career goals are on the horizon at least.

12

I was working at a software company for a while, but I was dissatisfied with the work I was doing. So I took the LSAT (Law School Aptitude Test) and was accepted at a couple of law schools.

One of them flew me out to interview for a scholarship (I didn’t get the main scholarship, but they offered me a lesser amount of money). They had students show us scholarship candidates around the campus, saying things like “you’ll be miserable for a few years, but afterwards it will all be worthwhile”. I decided that I didn’t want to be miserable for a few years so I turned down their offer. I ended up going back to school to study financial mathematics instead.

13

I had a moment where I wanted to be a cop :rofl:

What I wanted to be was a TV/novel style detective, solving puzzles and being the good guy in situations that largely turned out to be be pretty black and white, morally. As I got older, I realized that’s not actually a real job and I was definitely not temperamentally suited for what being a cop really meant.

14

I had every intention of becoming a high school science teacher, but my two good friends who graduated the year before me both became high school teachers and really hated it (in the long run, one gave up, the other continued , loved what she did, and became a popular education author). Anyway, I bailed on that plan and went to grad school for an MBA, and then found a completely different and very good career.

15

As a teen, I briefly thought about being a history teacher. I like history. Then I thought about what it would be like facing bored high school kids like at lot of my classmates day in and day out and decided teaching wasn’t for me. Instead, I fulfilled my lifelong dream of working in radio and TV. It had its ups and downs, and I never made any real money at it, but overall, it was fun. It was never like a real job, and every day was different.

Ironically, after I retired, a nearby historic site was looking for a tour guide. I applied and was hired. I look forward every day to taking visitors on a 60-minute journey through history, answering their questions and hearing their thoughts on what we’ve talked about. After more than 50 years, I actually have become a history teacher!

16

I wanted to do a lot of things. I guess it is possible to be interested in too many different things.

When I was in the 5th grade I wanted to be a writer. I kept coming back to that one over the years but never made much progress towards it. I have written a fair amount over the years as a hobby but I seem to be quite lacking in talent.

I always enjoyed taking things apart to understand how they worked. And I enjoyed fixing things. When I was a teenager I wanted to eventually open up my own bicycle shop and repair bicycles. I started tinkering with cars when I was a teenager (my friend’s father had an old car that he constantly tinkered with - I learned a lot about car mechanics from him). I never had the urge to become a car mechanic though.

I started tinkering with electronics when I was in grade school. My friend had one of those electronics kits where you could wire things together just by putting wires in springs.

I have also always enjoyed music. I play the piano/keyboards (I had about a decade of piano lessons), guitar, bass, trombone, as well as a few other instruments. I can play the drums a bit but I don’t consider myself to be a drummer. By the time I got to high school I had combined electronics and music as a hobby, and I was building my own guitar effects boxes and amplifiers and such.

I almost went into music, but then I decided that the low pay of that career wasn’t for me. It was a pretty late decision. I was still considering music up until the point where I had to actually make a final decision and stick with it.

I ended up with computer programming. By the time I was a senior in high school I knew more than all of the teachers and they basically just let me study whatever I wanted and kept buying things for me to learn (a COBOL package, for example). I also tinkered around a lot with machine language programming since it was pretty much required to do anything complex like writing games with the tiny 8 bit computers of that era. I wish I still had some of the games I wrote back then. They were kinda fun.

I also created and wired in some circuits to my Commodore 64 so that I could use it as a drum machine and synthesizer of sorts, and connected it to an audio mixing board that I had made. I made a lot of things just because I couldn’t afford to buy professional music gear.

I signed up for Computer Programming, but before I took any classes my uncle took me to the University and had me meet with the head of the Engineering department. By the end of the day they had convinced me to switch to Electrical Engineering, and that’s what I finally went into. I’ve taken enough programming classes over the years that I could have probably had a second degree in Computer Science if I had taken a few other electives and maybe a phys ed class or two. I have found that being both a hardware and a software engineer has given me some definite advantages in my career.

I still sometimes wonder what my life would have been like if I had stuck to music.

17

A few more than that :wink:. Aside from academia and museum jobs, the FDA, USDA and assorted health and vector control departments employ forensic entomologists. I think the number is probably closer to the low tens of thousands - say, maybe 20,000. I’ve also seen in the past several years some mild alarm that there are not enough the fill available slots in some places. Like most/all lab jockies, you won’t get rich but it can pay the bills.

My own youthful aspirations were to be a veterinarian. It got a lot vaguer when I got older, say college age. I probably most seriously considered leveraging my organismic biology background to get a job as a field biologist in the USGS or something similar. Or alternatively leveraging my history background and pursuing a MS in Library Science to become a research librarian somewhere. I had friends and acquaintances who had done both. Never seriously considered academia, I knew I didn’t have the drive (in particular) and skills to make it as a pure academic.

Instead I ended up in the skilled trades and got more of a very, very long-term job than a “career.” Can’t complain though. Don’t hate the gig and it pays better (and probably has better retirement benefits) than any of my other choices would have.

18

Lessee, as a language and economics double major, I have been a

  1. guidebook writer (pay sucks)
  2. investment banker (didn’t make it to the big bucks and the 1997 Asian crisis blew up most governments, & almost all of my clients)
  3. Consulting manager (always trying to get bums on seats but never a lot of money or satisfaction)
  4. high tech sales, which I’ve been doing for 20+ years. Not a bad gig but counting the days until I fully vest (715 days precisely but who’s counting?)
19

I was disenchanted enough early in my pathology residency to strongly consider going into internal medicine, and went so far as to apply for internal med residency programs, but ultimately decided against it, which I think was the right choice.*

I’ve known two other pathologists who completed residency and spent some time in practice, then switched medical careers. One went into psychiatry, the other internal medicine. Both were in their late 30s/early 40s when they made the change.

*an even better choice was shifting careers from broadcast journalism into research and then medicine in my early 30s.

20

Right from the get-go, I was fascinated by astronomy and archaeology. It was a simplistic view, of course, of doing nothing but looking at stars and planets, or digging up marvelous fossils. My mother killed that dream by telling my I had to be an engineer and that there was no money in the other two. As it turned out, I wasn’t fit for either of the hard sciences, as my skills at math and physics just weren’t up to the task. After failing miserably at civil engineering in college, I switched to psychology, which I was excellent at. That career was rejected for me by the U.S. government, who decided my skills were better used in the military. Dreams are just that. Reality is a hard teacher.