Career paths you considered and rejected

In My Humble Opinion
21

Same. Also: A poet in space, preferably in an orbital habitat.

My mother killed that dream by telling my I had to be an engineer and that there was no money in the other two.

I wrote to NASA, which told me to study math if I wanted to be an astronaut.

my skills at math and physics just weren’t up to the task.

I like math as a game, but not as a job requirement. Then I thought I might be a translator, though that seemed boring.

I switched to psychology, which I was excellent at.

Languages and psych for me.

That career was rejected for me by the U.S. government, who decided my skills were better used in the military.

Here we part ways. I enjoyed a first career as a teacher of English and related subjects, then became a counselor and instructor for community college + when I decided I wanted to have conversations with people about how they were and their goals, rather than the 5-paragraph essay structure.

Dreams are just that.

Now I’m retired and back to full-time creative writing, not a 5-paragraph essay in sight. There still aren’t colony stations at the Lagrange points, so I’m glad I didn’t wait around for that opportunity. My poetry is much better than Neil Armstrong’s, so NASA missed their chance to employ me.

22

I started undergrad thinking I was going pre-med. I was quickly dissuaded from that by early morning chem classes. Went into technical theater, designing sets, painting, building, etc. Grad school for set design, then I realized I didn’t want to continually sell myself to prospective clients, so I went to just painting and building.

Now, 25-odd years later, I build museum exhibits, and have to sell myself to prospective clients. Ooops.

23

I always wanted to be a writer, from a young kid. I went to journalism school for college. I REALLY wanted to be a comedy writer and really wanted to try an internship at Late Night with Conan O’Brien but 1) My school wouldn’t let me use that for internship credit 2) I am a huge wuss and could not make myself move to NYC.

So I stayed in journalism, which I loved, but realized it wasn’t for me. I wanted to go right to writing magazine feature pages, I had no time for covering city council meetings and the police blotter. That wasn’t a real career path tho.

Then I got in to doing web development. Started doing it with my brother’s friend in my junior year of college. When I graduated with my journalism degree I decided if I made $20k my first year doing web stuff, I’d stick with web stuff. I made $21k my first year and that was 26 years ago. I’m still in business with my brother’s friend and this is my career.

I never planned on doing any sort of programming, I just sort of fell into it backwards from knowledge of HTML. But I really love it, I love the logic stuff and the instant gratification.

I guess my story is sort of similar to @engineer_comp_geek but in the meekest, most dumb level. I also enjoyed playing music :rofl:

Oh, also, I didn’t want to cover city council meetings all those years ago when I was in journalism but now I am ON city council and have to go to the meetings anyway.

24

In high school I wanted to be a radio disc jockey. Took some classes in electronics for the FAA certifications required at the time. Got an intern job at a popular Seattle FM radio station. Worked with 3 different DJ’s, two treated me as an unpaid gopher, the other showed me how to run the studio and told me what it took for him to get where he was. After a month I moved to a smaller local Tacoma AM station and actually earned a small stipend. In the end I learned the pay is crap, the working hours can be long and there was no real “training” for that kind of work. The electronics training did pay off, did 4 years in the Navy as an electronic tech then 40 years at a big airplane company as a functional test tech. I still get comments to this day that I have a good voice for radio.

25

Same here. My parents even bought me a telescope when I was 9. The first time you look at the Moon through a telescope, it is a very awesome sight.

But then later I learned there was a lot of math involved, and I hated math, so I dropped that dream.

26

I was pretty much devoted to the biological sciences, when as I was approaching the end of my Master’s degree program, I received a draft notice. I quickly visited my Navy and Air Force recruiters to avoid being drafted into the Army. I served 4 years as an Air Force Officer and was seriously considering a military career, but what happened was quite surprising. I had set up an education program for enlisted men who were getting into minor trouble and who were not making grade. Instead of having them in jail, the program had requirements for studying for rank advancement. It was very successful in turning a number of young men around and headed in a positive direction. When my required 4 years were up, I decided to apply for inactive duty, and went back to university to get my teaching credential.

So for the last 30 years of my employed life, I taught Biology, Anatomy, Chemistry, and Physics. I enjoyed teaching very much, and really appreciated seeing my students go on to successes in their adult lives.

No regrets, even though I really only spent about a year working in the field as a botanist. Interestingly, my science background was put to use as my Air Force unit was involved in several programs developing new technologies.

I was able to retire at age 59, and still give workshops at irregular intervals at my advanced age of 81 now. Life is good!

27

This gave me a little giggle! Funny how some things work out!

28

For whatever reason, through school, college and early career I really enjoyed working in labs. After college I got a job with a pharma company as a formulator (dosage form design) - lab based, but pilot manufacturing also; in fact, because of the nature of the company, you got to do pretty much everything, from analysis to clinical trials manufacturing and all stops in between, including secondments in analysis (which I hated, but boy did it pay off) and medicines licensing. Then the company got taken over and I was offered a job doing nothing but analysis by the new owner. Ah, nope. And that’s how I ended up in medicines licensing (“Regulatory Affairs”).

But here’s the thing: at the time, your typical new Regulatory Affairs employee coming out of college was likely a pharmacist (or similar) who had done a 6 week course option in Regulatory Affairs and had maybe seen a picture of a tablet press. They had maybe heard of particle sizing by laser diffraction; I had written the SOP. I had a secondment in Regulatory, and years of experience in all manner of medicines design, development, manufacture and testing. I only knew of one other person in the UK Pharma industry who had a similar skill set to me.

All happened by accident, of course. But I was smart enough to grab the opportunity with both hands - and that’s the career; when I changed course, I had pretty much had enough of lab work and all that*; and when I retired I had pretty much had enough of work. I’ve never been a dreamer career-wise - things worked out fine for me without any long term planning, kinda fell into my lap, really.

j

* - Aside: when I walked away from labs and all that, the one thing I knew I was going to miss was working in sterile areas. Everything is different in there. Move slowly, calm your breathing, walk backwards through doors, lean backwards away from what you are working on, don’t speak more than you have to, communicate with your eyes, touch as little as possible…(etc)

Many years later, a client asked me if I would like to look around their clean (not sterile) room. God, yes! Just to go through the dressing procedures again was thrilling. It all came flooding back. I had a great day at work that day.

29

Maybe a threadshit, but… crime.

My older brother was a small town weed dealer, though not the biggest one. He did a lot of jail time, but always for car-related offenses, never a drug bust. As that allowed for work release, he quickly realized that he could bring hash back into lockup in his underwear, and increased his business by capturing that market.

The only downside was that his weekends in the can meant he lost the party and bar market at its most active time. That’s where I came in, as a delivery boy. As a minor I flew under the radar well, because the cops were inside the bars making busts in the bathrooms, not out in the parking lot. Instead of watching toilet stalls, you’d think they’d rather watch the pay phone.

What ended it all wasn’t the specter of inevitable arrest. My brother found a good girlfriend who cleaned him up and pointed him into college. Also around this time, another local dealer had an armed home invasion at his farmhouse (the only fatality was the family cat, killed with a shotgun to prove it wasn’t just a prank), probably by the same biker gang who were the area’s main suppliers.

A couple of my friends I’d recruited and I had a discussion about keeping the business rolling, and although it was hard to pass up the free lid of weed that came in every kilo sold, the future looked safer if we just paid full price like everyone else.

30

I was intending to get my doctorate in physical anthropology and try to get a faculty position somewhere. After two years of grad school and my masters, I lost all aspirations in this direction.

  1. Being an academic can be a politically-charged, ultra-competitive job. Recent graduates were holding multiple low-paying jobs for years trying to get any sort of junior teaching position.

  2. Funding for research is very hard to obtain…and you need research to publish. No publications? No position.

  3. It takes a long time to earn your doctorate. Most of my fellow students had been working at it for 6 to 10 years. It’s typical to take at least 2 to 3 years in the field (hopefully funded by some nice institute or agency) working on just basic research for your thesis.

  4. I spent quite a bit of time at dinners, receptions, and parties with other academics and faculty members at my school. Honestly…I didn’t care for the environment.

To this day, I can truthfully say that I have never made a dime off of my undergraduate and graduate degrees. That is to say, my degrees were helpful in obtaining employment in fields other than any related directly to my areas of study.

31

When I was about 10, I got a chem set. In the late 40s, they contained real chemicals; later on they were afraid of anything dangerous. I fell in love with it and decided I would become a chemist. When I failed to get any scholarship at the end of HS (there were no need-based scholarships then) I found a job in a biophysics lab that allowed me to pursue a degree part-time. Two things happened. First I discovered that I was lousy in a lab, didn’t enjoy and was not good at it. Second, one day I happened to overhear a conversation between two grad students. They were discussing a course in modern algebra one of them was taking. I asked what they were talking about and they started explaining it to me. I was intrigued and decided I would take that course the following year. Until that point, it had never occurred to me to study math. I always got my A without giving it any thought or spending any time studying. Anyway, at the end of that following year, I was hooked and never looked back. Still doing modern algebra (better called abstract algebra) 67 years later.

32

As a youngster I wanted to be a baseball player. Specifically I wanted to be a second baseman and to lead the league in stolen bases and triples. (Honest home runs were boring.)

It was soon apparent that I did not have the necessary skill set. As I got older, I was sure I’d be either a mathematician or scientist, a physicist either doing cosmology or particle physics. My undergraduate degree was in physics. However, my studies were at MIT and it was clear to me that I wasn’t one of the smartest nor most dedicated workers in the world as it had always seemed in high school.

I did go on and get a PhD and I am a professor, but not in Physics or Math.

33

I started off studying mechanical engineering. That shit is hard. I also had some electives in which I took art classes. I liked that a lot.

During this time I also had a computer class. Punch cards back in the stone age. I hated it.

I didn’t know what to do. I withdrew from school.

I had taken three years of drafting in high school. I was good, and I liked it. I ended up picking up some drafting jobs. Mapping really. I liked that.

Then the computer revolution REALLY hit. I was in the right place at the right time. GIS took off (it wasn’t called GIS yet). I had mapping/drafting skills. And actually a little experience on a computer. I got a job converting paper maps to digital ones. It wasn’t straight up digitizing though.

I taught myself programming. This was before there where any GIS classes available, and certainly no type of degree.

I’ve been doing this for 35 years. So in reality, I got into a field that combines technical stuff (engineering) with art (cartography). My title does have engineer in it, but I don’t have an engineering degree.

34

When I was in the Navy I expected I would work in the nuclear power field when I got out. I remember applying at a few places and the one place I got a response from was the University of Michigan–my home town university. The guy who ran their reactor program offered me a job which paid barely above minimum wage and required crazy hours but would include free tuition (or very cut-rate tuition). He gave me the weekend to think it over.
I came to the conclusion that he was looking for cheap labor and that I would be absolutely miserable trying to do the work and study at the same time, so I bowed out.

A couple of years later I started taking mechanical engineering courses and made it quite far, until the day that I needed a differential equations course that was not offered at night, and my boss said there was no way work would allow me to attend class during the day.

It just so happened I had been writing computer code since childhood and that was a good fit where I worked, so I switched my major and went forth. I have been doing this work for the past 30 years now.

35

Isn’t it more important for TV-Metpeople to be “pretty” than competent? … how many fat, 50+ females do you see on screen? It also seems that for every TV-met-person there must be 1000+ non-TV-met’s …

Also, I have the strong feeling that meteorology will be one of the first “industries” to be taken over by AI … - with better results

TL-DR: Your alternative does not sound much better than what you do now …

36

Just before starting college I talked to an advisor on what classes to take. I thought I had it worked out. I was going to take Physics and go that way. The advisor also asked what else I was interested in and I brought up computer programming.

The issue was the beginning programming class (in Fortran II, not even IV) was a 300 level class which I thought automatically ruled out an incoming frosh. But the advisor noted the prereqs were easy and I qualified so I signed up.

I’ve already told the story here about how the “prof” turned out to be a TA, explained what that was and I quickly thought “I’m going to do that!”. 3 years later I was doing that. CS PhD ensued.

I didn’t give up on Physics entirely though. I continued to take classes into grad school. I ended up satisfying all the Physics BS degree requirements except 6 hours of labs and 3 hours of seminars. A double degree was out of reach since they required taking a lot of extra hours in whatever. That seemed pointless. And since I was on a fast track to get a degree that wasn’t happening.

I also did tutoring, paper grading, etc. for both departments.

One big tip from years in academia: Don’t lock yourself into one major freshman year. Be open minded. (Some places don’t even allow frosh to declare a major.)

37

A more recent career path turnabout I could have taken happened immediately following the Great Recession of 2008. I had a friend who was out of work and had heard about an Automation Alley program to give high-level technical training to anyone who wanted it, for free, in a push to keep SE Michigan an engineering hub. He wanted to try to become a CAD designer. But he was not very computer-literate; so partly out of curiosity, and partly for moral support, I signed up for the class with him.

I discovered I enjoyed working with CATIA software and I had a real knack for 3D modeling. My friend, on the other hand, didn’t really grok it, despite my attempts to help him out. He decided to drop out after the week-long Spring break.

Then I had a choice to make. I had been rushing across town to get to the evening CAD class after my regular job. Do I continue on my own? I had a solid job as a web developer in a flourishing field that had nothing to do with the auto industry, a relative rarity in SE Michigan. The Big Three automakers were on the ropes, and it seemed a very real possibility at the time that one or more of them might go away for good. Do I trade the career path I was on for one that seemed much more uncertain at the time? I decided to drop the class too. Since then I’ve done fine in web dev, but the SE Michigan auto and manufacturing industries did bounce back, and sometimes I wonder how things might have gone if I’d pursued CAD design.

38

Here in the U.S., there’s a certain proportion of TV meteorologists who are attractive younger women (and some hunky guys, too), but there’s absolutely also many of them who aren’t, and many of them make their name for being a trustworthy, competent source of weather information to their viewers.

For example, in Chicago, where I live, the “name” in TV weather was, for decades, the recently-retired Tom Skilling, who is affable, good at explaining weather to the layman, and absolutely not “pretty.” He was trusted and beloved by Chicago viewers.

39

I had no great interest in careers past the childhood desires, mainly I wanted to be a cowboy. Also a jockey after reading Man O’ War in the 4th grade. I was a skinny little kid and if only I stopped growing at the time it could have come about. Later, I was considering a number of jobs like cook or truck driver to bide my time until I cared about something, and determined that I would never become a computer programmer because they were all strange people. Can you guess what happened? Turns out ‘strange’ is a valuable job qualification.

40

Despite my childhood atheism I considered being rabbi early on.

Also childhood imaginings of advertising as a creative thing.

Thought about architecture during High School.

Started college in the business school.

Then moved to premed thinking pediatrics but maybe research.

During med school considered internal med Peds dual programs but went with Peds.

End of residency considered accepting an offer to stay on as a Neo fellow but went with general pediatric practice. Been same practice ever since.

Not exactly the straight path but once there stable. First medical person in the family.