I need a career

Miscellaneous and Personal Stuff I Must Share
41

[QUOTE=Cisco]
Do you earn a salary though, Dave? I’ve done salary + commission and I like that, because I know how much I’m going to make + busting my ass will greatly increase it, but I’ve also done 100% commission and I don’t like the uncertainty of that. A couple slow months strung together can really hurt.
[/QUOTE]

No, It’s not Salary + Commission, but they do pay you an advance against your earned commission. I understand where you’re coming from, but honestly, in the 10 years that I’ve been doing this I’ve never had more than a bad couple of weeks thrown together, and those were almost always my fault. The flip side is that after a few years, you can stop working for a couple months at a time and still make plenty as your earned commission keeps coming even if you’re not adding more to the pot. I don’t know what the Phoenix office is like though, a LOT of the job depends on whose running the office you work out of, the one I work out of is the best in the country, but the other Md. office is one of the worst, IDK if I could be successful there.

42

That site is really pushing Nuclear engineer. If I had an infinite amount of time and money to waste on school, I would totally do Nuclear Chemistry. That field is going to take off like a rocket soon.

43

Oh hey, I just realized you’re in Phoenix. Get a job at an HVAC company. Make all your money in four months because of dumbasses like me who wait until mid-July to find out their AC needs to be repaired/replaced, and take the rest of the year off. :stuck_out_tongue:

44

Actually, since nobody else has mentioned it, I’ve got one word for you: Plastics

45

[QUOTE=ultrafilter]
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.

[/QUOTE]

Where are you at? I was doing some googling the other day and one site said those jobs are outpacing the average job market and expected to grow by something like 23% in the next few years. I have a couple of friends who teach adjunct (masters only) and they’re turning classes down because they’re so busy. A counselor at my school told me awhile back that 50% of the tenured professors there are scheduled to retire in the next 8 years, and enrollment is expected to keep rising.

(I just looked and here’s that cite http://www.bls.gov/oco/ocos066.htm)

Can you add more words? I’ve heard speculation that glass, paper, and cardboard are expected to make comebacks with the rising cost of the raw materials for plastics.

46

[QUOTE=Cisco]
Can you add more words? I’ve heard speculation that glass, paper, and cardboard are expected to make comebacks with the rising cost of the raw materials for plastics.
[/QUOTE]

That’s a joke. It is a line from a movie, The Graduate, lampooning middle class career choices. If you already knew that, a double woosh for me.

47

[QUOTE=threemae]
That’s a joke. It is a line from a movie, The Graduate, lampooning middle class career choices. If you already knew that, a double woosh for me.
[/QUOTE]

Nope, and I’ve seen The Graduate. I think I’ve even used that line before :smack:.

48

[QUOTE=ultrafilter]
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.
[/QUOTE]

One area where you might not find that is accounting. Since the OP is already doing some of that, looking into teaching with a master’s in accounting might not be a bad thing to do. Adjunct teaching is a low-paying, low-security gig, though. More something to do before or after a career than as a career.

49

[QUOTE=Cisco]
I was hoping to get some dopers with really awesome jobs in here telling me I should go into their field. Paging all of these members!
[/QUOTE]

I wouldn’t classify my job as “really awesome” but it’s fairly dynamic, multi-disciplinary, and well-paying. At the junior level you could probably make $30-something an hour.

I work in clinical research data management for pharmaceutical companies. Basically the company is developing a drug and it needs to know if there’s, say, a difference in effectiveness and safety between 5mg and 10mg. The data manager’s job is to make sure all the appropriate data is collected and validated before handing it off to statistics for reporting. It involves designing forms that the investigating sites fill out (paper or electronic), reviewing and testing the database, designing validations (little logic problems to ensure the forms are being filled out correctly), reviewing the data as it comes in (usually via some SAS or SQL programming), creating guidelines for filling out forms and data flow, basically making sure everything is as tidy as can be and/or overseeing such. Study sites can be in just about any country, so you have language issues to contend with, regulatory bodies, and so on.

I think most places require a bachelor’s in a science (I have a BA in music) and that certain something that they determine through interviews. The entry level position is usually as a Clinical Data Coordinator or Assistant. You might be able to get your foot in the door with an associates.

The upside is you participate in drug development (if that’s something you want to participate in), get paid well, there are many aspects to the job that may or may not pique your interest, and the people are typically pretty nice to work with.

The downside is there’s a certain amount of drudgery (as in all work, I suppose), you’re working on studies that cost $10s of millions to run, and may be on tight submission schedules so there’s periodic stress, and you run into the occasional boss from hell. If you don’t like it (many don’t) and are sufficiently motivated you can move to other areas of clinical research.

Another downside is it’s the kind of work that goes through cycles of outsourcing and contracting so there’s not a whole lot of security these days, unless you’re higher up. Even then, maybe not. I’m looking for work now after a contract ended. A lot of work is done by CROs (contract research organizations) so that might be a good place to look.

Yet another downside is that it’s largely confined to certain epicenters: NY-NJ-Philadelphia and surrounding areas, Boston, Raleigh/Cary NC, a couple places in the upper mid-west and the big cities along the west coast. There are exceptions, of course.