I’ve heard stories and actually met people who followed the same career path as a parent or close relative: e.g. “Dad was a farmer, and so am I.” Hence the topic question.
My mother was a SAHM - while in my childhood, I figured I’d do the same, by the time I was in high school, I decided I wanted to teach. That lasted till my first semester in college, then I joined the Navy and eventually became an aerospace engineer. No one in my family or extended family was career military or an engineer.
My brother kinda sorta followed our dad’s path in that he got into business, tho Dad worked for foreign freight forwarders and rose to become a VP, while bro started as an accountant and is now Prez and CEO of the company where he’s about to retire from.
My late FIL was a field engineer for Burroughs, tho he really wanted to be a tool maker, and I think that’s partly why my husband became a machinist and tool maker before going back to school to become a mechanical engineer. He followed his dad’s dream in the beginning.
To what extent was your career choice influenced by family?
My career path was decided by the Cold War ending. I was slowly working towards my Electrical Engineering Degree (EE) when my friends from High School where not getting jobs as Engineers. (I had taken 4 years off in the Navy, so I was behind even my younger friends.)
My wife to be had a Mechanical Engineering (ME) degree but after not securing a job, she went to a Programming School and was working as a Programmer/Analyst and another older friend from Bell Labs/Bell Works was a ME that had switched to programming C and then Java long ago. I took their advice very seriously when they suggest I switch to Programming.
Everyone and everything recommended that I was best off giving up on Engineering and getting into Programming. Searching the want ads, my best bet appeared to be in boring business programming. COBOL and RPG programmers were in demand and without a pesky 4 year degree requirement. Breathing was the major requirement.
So no family members, but my fiancée, her brother and many, many friends showed me the way to programming. I’ve already retired from it, having become a dinosaur along the way. I got pretty good at SQL and web building, but no languages more advance than RPGLE. Whoops.
So many of my High School classmates got their Engineering degree and ended up in other fields. Brutal, considering how tough a course load Engineering is. About half of them ended up coding.
My father was a physician. People when I was a kid would always ask me if I wanted to be one as well, “just like Daddy?”…
Ummm, “nope.” My mom once painted a cut I had with a reddish lotion. She says my eyes promptly rolled back in my head and I fainted. No surprise, I was always weirded out by the sight of blood and guts and such, tho in my latter-middle age that finally died down to a certain extent. [if I see it in movies I can rationalize it away now as special effects]
After an abortive move into mechanical engineering I eventually got my degree in zoology, but instead used it to get into teaching. So yep in my case those that can’t, teach.
I did not follow a career path of anyone in my family. I suppose my husband was a strong influence, as I changed careers and went back to school after marrying him, but our careers overlap only in general field if application, nothing in common day to day.
The thread title reminded me of a funny story, though, where someone I know literally chose his brother’s career. Any errors in this story are my own, it’s been a few years since I heard the story.
Coworker and his brother are Argentinian and as I understood it, military service was mandatory unless you were enrolled in university. Brother was in the military and hated it, so asked Coworker to go to the university and enroll him in something (had to be in person back in those days). I don’t recall if Brother specified a subject, I think possibly Engineering but I could be wrong. Coworker, being a bit of a prankster, agreed, but signed his brother up for a degree in Geology instead. He figured Brother can change it on his own.
Turns out Brother became interested in the subject and had a long and successful career in Geology, retiring a few years ago.
I still smile at my Coworker’s mischievous giggles when he told me this story. So silly!
My dad was an options trader. I was a writer with dreams of publishing novels and a faltering career in advertising. Just before I turned 30 he offered to pay me way more money than I was making to join him in his business. I accepted.
Worst decision of my life.
Oh, the money was good, and I quickly learned the skills to trade successfully. But I was never comfortable with the atmosphere of the exchange floor, and working closely with my dad corroded our relationship, which had been close and friendly.
Then the markets blew up in 2008-9, and the money wasn’t good anymore. By 2011 I was out of a job, close to losing my house, and barely speaking with my dad.
With a lot of networking, hard work and serendipity, I found myself back in the ad business by 2015 and have thrived (professionally and emotionally, if not monetarily) ever since. Things were never the same with my dad, though. He died in 2016 and I still have a hard time remembering him fondly.
I come from a family of pharmacists. I had zero interest in that. My father said he only chose it for lack of imagination (well, his exact words were “it was as good as anything else”).
Closest I ever got is my mother and aunt both worked at NIH, and I work across the street at Walter Reed, but not doing what either of them did.
Heh. My uncle was a veterinarian, and my mom wanted to be one so started working for him. The first time she attended surgery she promptly went clunk. No vet career for you!
I started off in engineering school because I didn’t know any better and my older sister was in engineering as well.
However, after graduating, I went first into sales and business in Japan. I’m quite conformable saying none of my family, close or distant relatives ever came to Japan to work in business.
Later, I changed careers and became a teacher, but none of my family or close relatives are or were teachers.
I’d have to say yes and no . I didn’t follow anyone’s actual job , exactly ( there was a cousin who worked at my agency but I didn’t know that when I applied) - but I did follow a number of my family members into the public sector.
My mother was a teacher and because she was a devout Catholic and Dad was a lawyer, she thought everyone should become either a teacher, a lawyer, or a priest/nun. I became a teacher. All during my childhood, she told me I’d be a good teacher, but I hated school and loathed polyester pantsuits, which seemed to be de rigueur for women who taught.
Eventually teaching found me when a local college needed adjunct comp instructors. I then became the director of a nonprofit agency before returning to teaching, this time high school English and history.
Mom was right, and I looked forward to going to work every day. My eldest sister taught special ed, so Mom got two teachers out of four kids. No lawyers or priests, though.
My immediate family and extended family were 100% blue collar. No one went to college, but most did go into skilled trades.
I was the anomaly: I wanted to go to college and become an electrical engineer. And after my parents divorced when I was 12, it made it that much tougher to pursue that dream. As an aside, I somehow pulled it off, despite living in poverty w/ my mother and zero support from my father.
Almost exactly half my story. My dad’s a physician; I’ve got a very profound needle phobia, and getting big cuts makes me very faint. No way in hell was I gonna enter the medical field.
On the other hand, in her thirties, my mom went back to school to get her teacher’s license. She taught elementary classes for awhile, eventually becoming an academically-gifted teacher in an elementary school. Whereas I, in my thirties, went back to school and got my teacher’s license, and I taught elementary classes for awhile, eventually becoming an academically-gifted teacher in an elementary school.
Only accidentally, and not to a great extent. My father was an equipment operator (construction), my stepfather was a bartender, and my mother was a state employee.
I had a career in the military in the Naval Construction Force, but was an electrician. This wasn’t a choice because of my father’s work and not at all what I had envisioned when younger. I used to drink a lot, but luckily it never became a full-time occupation. I do draw a small retirement from the state of Alaska, and spent most of my working life either working directly for, or contracted to, government entities. This had nothing to do with my mother’s work, but rather just how life ended up.
My dad is in IT and I ended up there too. It was an accident though, mostly I guess.
Growing up as I did, we always had computers around. My dad was a huge computer enthusiast even before he did that sort of thing for a living. He was in the Navy, and his job didn’t really involve computers, but he did it as a hobby and once he retired from the military that’s what he did as his job. Since I was a little kid I was always exposed to computers, like the old Apple IIe and the very first successful Macintosh computer (a 128K), and I even learned how to write code in BASIC on an old Atari console from a cartridge.
My interest was in video game development. In the 90s, there was no obvious way to get into that, and the best I could find was just going for a generic degree in computer science. I ended up not graduating for reasons I don’t want to waste time explaining but I found myself working jobs like labor and retail. One of those retail jobs was at a computer store, and my experience there combined with my general comfort with technology due to my upbringing (and a tiny bit from college) became the foundation for my IT career.
Later, my dad got me hired to the environmental consulting firm he worked for as the IT manager. I was hired solely to do inventory stuff. But because of everything I learned at the computer store, I actually had a better handle on computer hardware than even he did, as well as quite a bit about supporting the Windows operating system (at that time Win 98 was the latest greatest thing). I also decided to pursue getting certifications to make myself look legit and to give myself some real IT skills. I was rehired as an IT person at that company and I’ve been doing that ever since. (Not at that company though, it ceased to exist a long time ago; I’ve had I think 8 different IT jobs since then.)
But nothing was planned. I really got into IT support stuff to pay my bills and stay off the street. It was an opportunity that I took advantage of and somehow turned into a long career (I’ve now been doing that stuff for about 25 years). My dad doesn’t do exactly what I do anymore, he now teaches the next generation of IT folks, but for many years he did the same kind of work I do.
I didn’t follow the career of anyone in my family. My youngest brother became a surgeon, though, possibly because my father had always wanted at least one of his four kids to be a doctor.
Many of my older relatives, including my dad, were scientists or engineers. I went into the same field, sort of. My degrees are in physics but I had a long career as a computer programmer.
Both my parents were RN’s. I grew up listening to them talk shop and decided I wanted to be an RN, too. I made it as far as earning a CNA license but then kind of flamed out of school and did hospice/LTC caregiving for 14 years before having what I think was a mental breakdown. So I went back to college in my 30’s, this time approaching it seriously, earned both undergrad and graduate degree in history, and now teach remedial reading, writing, and math in a boarding school. Not the career I had envisioned when I went back to school but one I’m happy enough with. If I had to do it over again knowing what I know now I’d probably try to stick with medicine and become a physician – not an RN – but that would require 1) being serious about tackling the rigors of college right out of high school (something I clearly wasn’t able or willing to do at 17) and 2) having more brains than I do. I had this fantasy of being a small town physician sort of like in Doc Hollywood or Northern Exposure but obviously that wouldn’t be very feasible in the real world. So being an educator worked out well.
Nobody else in my family are teachers.
My wife comes from an endless, unbroken line of high school dropouts, welfare moms, and deep, intense, destructive generational poverty. She went to college when I did, in her 30’s, over her parents’ objections – she was informed under no uncertain terms that women were supposed to stay home while their husbands did the 9-5 thing at the local mill or wherever because that was the way God ordained it. My wife wanted none of that, thankfully, and she subsequently earned an AA. When Covid hit and she lost her job she went back to school again and, finally, just a couple of weeks ago, finished her BA. She is the first person in her family to go to college, the first to earn an AA (since then her sister has earned one as well), and the only person in her family to have earned a BA. She’s also the only woman in her family – literally the only woman – to have a career other than housewife / SAHM. The sister who earned her AA a few years ago did so because she was bored. She has since not used the degree for anything, she’s still a housewife. Several of the women in my wife’s close family – sisters, cousins, nieces – are on “disability” (because actual welfare isn’t available to them anymore) and most are cripplingly poor to the extent where many survive off of food from Dollar Tree and food pantry boxes. But that’s a rant for a different thread. My wife decided not to follow that so-called career and I am deeply thankful for that.
My brother is a cement mason, so he had no interest in the medical field either.
Negatively. Oh, don’t get me wrong, I love my father, mother and step-mother. And initially I did want to do as my mother and father did and teach at a college level. But I also got to see close up the battles and politics of school faculty, the emphasis on publish rather than teach, and the constant stream of gladhanding and fundraising expected. -shudder-
The other was my step-mother, a wonderful, skilled, practicing lawyer. Who worked ten hour days every day, and took home more work every single night and weekend. I’ve been told by the (numerous) other lawyers among friends and family that I’d likely have been very GOOD at it (if somewhat evil) but I’d rather be happy and relaxed (to the extent the current world allows it) than rich or successful.