Now with all this being said I’m having a few second thoughts here if this is the best course of action to take. I’m questioning if I will have a job of some kind ( a decent job ) at the end of the two years and also if this will be something that I will really enjoy.
As some background I graduated from college two years ago with my degree in accounting and it has been a huge flop. I hate the subject material to begin with and for added measure I can’t find anything in it so after talking to my parents/other family and friends the best course of action is to really just close the book on this and drive on. Before I majored in accounting I was studying to be a history and an art teacher but since the job market sucks for both subjects unfortunately I was advised to change my major to the one above.
Now since it looks like I’m ready to head down another avenue I’m really trying to make sure I’m on the right path. For one will I be doing something I like? What I mean by that is how much will I be putting my artistic/illustration talent to good use? Am I going to have a tough time finding work in the current market or since it would be two years in the very near future?
Sorry if I’m coming off as waffling but I need to make sure this time school is going to pay off because I’ve really run out of ideas and don’t know what else to do. Thanks everyone for your input
My brother worked in construction until he hurt his back. He went into drafting thinking that he could use some of his real world experience. He completed the course with no problems; however, the job market in drafting dried up at about the same time. He works for TSA now.
I have a friend who is an architect. When the economy goes south, lot’s of architects are out of work. New construction is the first thing to drop off the table when the economy goes bad. I’m assuming the same for drafting.
As far as the current job market, why not look at sites such as Monster.com to see what the job market is like.
My son is a CPA and I’m a database administrator. Both jobs aren’t all that enjoyable and there’s a lot of boring minutia. However they all pay very, very well probably because a lot of people just don’t like such work and don’t get into it. Study accounting or history? History would be way more fun. On the other hand I worked with a receptionist who had a Masters in History but was only making a few bucks above minimum wage.
But at the end of the day, such jobs do pay well and there’s still the enjoyment of doing a job done well. Plus we can afford such things as our own homes, new cars, new bicycles, trips, and so on. I only work about 2,200 hours a year. The other 6,500 are mine to play with.
Is there not any kind of career advisement center at the college?
As far as whether you will have a job at the end of the two years goes, probably no one will walk up and hand you one. Pretend for the moment that you do have the degree and see what jobs are currently available for someone in that position. Obviously that could change in two years, but it should give you some idea. Maybe even check with some recruiters and see what they say about the job market. This could even lead to making some personal industry connections that you will have two years to build on to help find that job.
As far as whether you will enjoy the work, why not use the first semester to figure that out? Sure college is not free, but community college is pretty cheap. Talk to your professors and try to set up an internship somewhere to really get a taste of what a job will be like and to add to your résumé.
If history and art are your passion though, I’d return to that. You don’t need a job market, you need one job. People are working in these fields. You could be one of them and it isn’t just some random crap shoot who they are.
I’ve worked as a process engineer in industry for 30 years. When I started I’d sketch out something and bring it down to drafting, in a week or ten days one of the dozens of draftsmen would bring up a draft, I’d redline it and bring it back in a couple of days, they’d make the changes and back it would come, and a couple iterations later I’d have a beautiful drawing about a month after I started the whole process.
Now, I slap together a bunch of pieces and parts from AutoCAD templates into a piping and instrumentation drawing, run it through the plotter, and have a mediocre drawing in only a few hours. The drawings are nothing like what a professional draftsman would have done, but they’re good enough, and that’s all anyone cares about these days. We’ve got only one draftsman left, and his only job is putting together bound booklets of the mediocre drawings for sales presentations. It’s moderately depressing, but I don’t have long until retirement, so there’s that.
How did drafting come about? Do you know any drafters?
I would be very wary of walking in to a new profession that I didn’t know a lot of people in. I successfully navigated a pretty big barred change, but it only worked because I had many examples of people in my field to follow.
Hey, I’ve seen you make other posts about art and being an artist before. I seem to understand hand drafting is not done very much at all in architecture or engineering nowadays. I think graphic design is a better route to take if you are interested in a job that involves a steady paycheck and doing something that puts your artistic talents to work.
Or GIS. GIS is not all cartography (by a long shot), but if you can get hooked into that aspect of it, their is quite a bit of design and artistry going on.