WTF? Respiratory therapist? I feel queasy just being in the presence of blinky medical equipment!
Have you considered cage fighting? C’mon, I know you’re interested!
SO interested! A little old to get started, though, and the retirement sucks :).
When did you go to law school? I saw Bricker mention in another thread recently that it was since you joined the board. What was your situation and what made you decide to go, and are you glad you did?
Long story. I have to go to court right now, but I’ll give you the details when I get back.
Hokay. I went to law school in 1999. I had just moved back to Texas after living in Prague for two years following undergrad, and I had no money, no job, no plans, and no girlfriend. My father has been an attorney since I was a baby and told me that if I wanted to attend law school he’d help me out financially. I didn’t really have anything better to do, so I took the LSAT and applied. It could have been a recipe for disaster, but I loved law school. I threw myself into it nearly obsessively, came out with the top grades for my first year class, and got merit scholarships for tuition for the remainder of school. I graduated salutatorian and got a year long term as a law clerk to a U.S. District Judge as my first real life lawyer job, and it was the best job I could have hoped for, challenging, fun, interesting, etc. Since then I’ve been a solo practicioner, and while it’s not quite as fun as the clerkship, it’s still interesting and mostly rewarding.
Now the downsides: I say “mostly rewarding,” because the parts that aren’t can be like getting your teeth drilled. It can be aggravating and stressful, and it’s not for everyone. Law school itself is an extraordinary commitment in terms of time and effort, and I’m not sure I could have done it with a girlfriend, wife, or family. I had friends who did (and I was born while my dad was in law school), but they had very, very understanding and supportive families. I was very lucky in that I was able to get a law degree and come away not owing any student loans, but the same wasn’t true of most of my friends in law school. Some of them owed $50,000 or more, and I know people who owe up to $100,000. Some people flunked out the first year or never could pass the bar and had student loans on a legal education they couldn’t use. I’m glad I went to law school and became a lawyer because I really feel like I ended up in the job I’m most suited for, but it’s not a decision I’d encourage anyone to make lightly.
Oh, something I forgot to mention that may interest you, though: with a law degree you can qualify for the Law Entry Program to be a Special Agent with the FBI. I thought very seriously about it when I was still in the federal courts, but I have some colorblindness and eyesight problems that would probably disqualify me.
My wife actually went for one semester and realized it wasn’t for her, so she quit and went to culinary school, but it was still $20,000. That’s part of my reluctance: I don’t want to, effectively, make that same mistake twice. We would be crippled financially for years to come.
:eek: Just how hard is the bar? I knew people stressed over it, but I wasn’t aware that there were people who made it all the way through law school and couldn’t pass it. (I think it’s a state thing (?) but talk to me in general terms here.)
I know you’ve tentatively ruled it out, but I had a professor in college that was a tropical ichthyologist. He taught for about 9 months and then spent 3 months in various tropical locations bopping around on boats for various studies. Another couple of professors had the same kind of deal going, but studied small mammals everywhere from Africa to Yellowstone.
Some are harder than others. California’s is notoriously hard, for example. The D.C. bar is hard, so law students intending to practice there usually pop over to Virginia to take their bar and then apply to be admitted to the D.C. Bar “on motion.” In Texas, the overall pass rate is about 80%. Texas also has a limit that not all states have; if you fail five times, that’s it. It’s very rare, but it happened to two people I know. One moved to Florida and passed there, the other’s story was much more tragic.
Sounds like an awesome job (this is what the guys in Jaws IV did, right?), but wouldn’t it require a PhD? And I couldn’t leave my family for 3 months a year every year. I would love to travel for work but it’d have to be days or weeks at a time, not months. At least not with any frequency.
:eek: These are the kind of horror stories that can really scare you out of a career. (I’m actually more afraid of hating law school and dropping out, though; I’m pretty good at tests. My second biggest fear would be only finding boring jobs that left me buried under paperwork.)
Okay, see, until now I never had a reason to even consider law school. That’s awesome. 
With an interest in the humanities/arts, have you considered looking into being a copy editor? You will not get rich – decidedly not – but it can be pretty satisfying work for someone with a literary bent.
As far as education, it’s more a matter of aptitude and qualifying yourself for the work than specific requirements. Though some publications ask for a degree in English or journalism, for many others any bachelor’s degree will do, and if you test well enough, no one is likely to make an issue of what your undergrad degree was in. I don’t have a college degree at all, myself – I’m just really good 
It’s also not that hard to get shift work, work-from-home deals, or freelance gigs if you find you need those options at some point. Yes, newspapers are dying, but the so-called “content industry” rolls on, and editors aren’t becoming obsolete quite as fast as other journalism pros. (Though, indeed, our day is coming.)
For me, I find working with good writers so rewarding that it offsets the frustration of dealing with those who are, shall we say, less gifted. Usually.
And graduate school in biology or biological sciences is no walk in the park; at one point I considered going into computational molecular biology but was pretty much talked out of it by the horror stories from a number of doctoral candidates and postgraduates, especially the worse-than-normal publish or perish mentality, the publication credit theft, and expectation of near-slave labor. It is definitely something you need to have a passion for in order to overcome the negatives.
Currently, I make rockets not fall over. (At least, one hasn’t fallen over on my watch yet.) It has its moments, like hanging off a 140’ gantry at Wallops in February, but a lot of them are pretty dull, especially the bits with endless PowerPoint(less) presentations. I need a real career, too, but not sure where to go; in past lives I’ve been a cook, programmer, security dispatcher and technician, light construction worker, and scuba instructor, and have no desire to do any of those on a paycheck basis again. I have friends who recommend law school (which sounds fine, but I think I’d last about two weeks in legal practice before completely wigging out), teacher (like explaining, hate bureaucracy and disciplining or dealing with opprobrious students and parents), writer (what are the odds of being the 0.01% of freelance or fiction writers who actually make an independent living at it), screenwriter (probably end up writing for the sort of lame sitcom staring the current Brat Pack of the Hour that I detest now, or worse yet “adapting” a sharp-witted British sitcom into some pablum acceptable by American network censors), or genius superspy and raconteur (It’s my dream, piss off). The reality is that once I get to some terminating juncture in this job I’ll probably go on to some other engineering thing which will be different, only exactly the same; perhaps I’ll finally go back to school so I can do more of the same, piled higher and deeper.
Anyway, what was my point? Whatever, good luck to you, and let me know if you figure out the secret. Don’t go publishing it in some book with the title, How To Escape Your Corporate Hellhole and Be Happy And Successful because then everyone will buy it and companies will figure out how to subvert or prevent it.
Stranger
Frankly, “making rockets not fall down” sounds much less rewarding than “making rockets fall down.”
How do I get one of those gigs?
I got those plus clergy. :dubious:
Cisco, paralegal might be a great job for you. It requires you to think on your feet, respond to a number of different audiences, react quickly and change strategies as needed. There are paralegal certificate programs that give you the basics, and then it’s pretty much on the job training. That would give you the fun of law without the un-fun of law school debt.
Oh I got that too, heh. Crap like that is why I’m done with career quizzes/tests/books/websites.
Thanks, I’ll check out that link. It does sound like a great job. I guess if I got into that field and really loved it I could go to law school sometime down the road when time and money aren’t so tight, yeah?
That’s my general course of action, though I’d probably be quite happy doing this as a long-term career. There are certain specialized paralegal roles, medical paralegal being the most common, which require a lot of education or on-the-job training.
Most of the medical paralegals I know either have pre-med bachelor’s degrees and lots of legal experience, or legal degrees and lots of medical experience. Or both.
OK, so you may be thinking about getting a bachelor degree. You are looking for excitement. You don’t want to get yelled at, but you are considering a challenging position. Let me be frank with you. In the Army, for the first couple weeks, yes you will get yelled at. You can work in a stressful environment can’t you. Most of the yelling is to make sure that you can stay calm under pressure. After you get through the start of Basic Training, you don’t get yelled at anymore unless you choose to do what you are trained not to do. In a support position, you will not have someone try to scare or bully you into doing what is right, because you will know the right thing to do.
As to getting shot at, you sound like the kind of person I was when I went to see my Recruiter for the first time. I told him I would consider enlisting if I was to have a job where I would not get shot at. I’ve been in for eight years, and never been shot at. A lot of it has to do with the job you choose. Medics, para-legal, supply clerks, are not in positions where being fired upon is a daily event.
Granted, the Marines will tell you that you are a Rifleman first, but in the Army, you will be trained to defend yourself, should that situation arise, but your primary job is the one you chose.
BTW, I will not be able to enlist you as I am in NE Texas, so I would advise you to talk to an Army recruiter in your area, but PM me if you have any questions or concerns about the Army. I will try to give you the…Well, Straight Dope.
SSG Schwartz
Staff Sergeant I appreciate the input but I’ve decided, for sure, years ago, that the military is not for me. I come from a family of marines so I made an informed decision. If our country was ever under attack I would join up to defend us but short of that it’s off the table.
Are there any college teachers here? Especially adjunct or otherwise non-PhD level instructors.
Right now the tenure-track job market is so bad that you effectively have to have a PhD to be an adjunct, and I don’t think you’ll have much more luck in the community college market without one.
Regarding my earlier comments, I’m not specifically involved in computational bio, but I’ve looked into it in some detail. threemae’s comments are relevant now, but it’s tough to predict how the job market will look in ten years.