The first few years of that cube job are a continuation of your education - and you thought you were done. You need to learn how it applies - and you need to learn about all the other stuff they didn’t teach you in college.
It may not be glamorous or exciting, but you’ll be surprised at how fast your engineering education will go stale if you were to join the Peace Corp or go backpacking through Asia. Spend a few years in the real world to cement the education - and pay attention. You may not like what you are doing, but what do you like about it. What else do you see. You might discover a knack for management, or an interest in patent law. Or you might discover that your passion is nature photography and travel, and a desk job that enables you to pursue your passion is worth being a cube jockey. Or you might decide to get out from under those student loans as fast as possible, save enough money to buy a little piece of land, and quit and leave civilization. Or maybe instead you’ll marry, buy a house in the burbs, have two kids, and retire for engineering at 68 having given your kids security.
In a few years, with those student loans paid off, you’ll be in a better place to make decisions.
(Sven’s situation was pretty different, she graduated in a field where its really difficult to find a job that pays a living wage right out of college. The Peace Corp is a great option for us Liberal Arts majors who don’t need to use our knowledge or risk loosing it.)
Depends on the office and whether the employee is hourly or salaried. I’m hourly, and my shift is 8.5 hours long with a half-hour lunch. Other places can have a full hour lunch off the clock for hourly workers. An hour lunch is too long, but I’d rather have 45 minutes. Some places do an 8 hour day with a half-hour off for lunch, so you get paid for 7.5 hours a day.
For salaried folks, it’s all mutable. They may come in between 8-9 and leave between 4-6 and take no lunch (eat while working at their desk) or a long paid lunch, depending on their workload that day.
I’m straying from the OP here, but I want to clarify that Peace Corps is not just a liberal arts thing. Engineers design and build innovative solutions for getting clean drinking water, safely disposing of waste, building housing that is resistant to disaster, and other infrastructure projects. In Mexico, they work with national level research labs advising government departments and large businesses on how to use technology for economic growth. Tech people teach at universities, help local tech entrepreneurs build their businesses, develop national-level technology policy, apply technology to improve health, and work with governments and businesses to use technology to promote economic growth and national well-being.
Bio people develop sustainable agriculture programs that improve crop yields while protecting the soil, advise on fishery and livestock programs that improve local nutrition and fuel economic growth, help create and market value-added agricultural products that return more money to the community, help businesses improve their environmental impact, and work with national parks to protect wildlife. Medical people train and advise at clinics, community health centers and hospital, and do things like develop well-baby programs and train midwives. Business types work with banks and microfinance centers, help local entrepreneurs grow their business, connect local artisans to global markets, and build value chains that bring more money into communities.
Peace Corps is not for everyone, but they love placing people with hard skills, as they can do some really exciting work.
I missed the edit window, but my cohort had four IT education volunteers. Our experience ranged from my somewhat dubious “Digital Media” BA to a mid-career Microsoft engineer. We spent our time teaching at high schools and universities, advising on the creation of Cameroon’s national IT education policy, writing and distributing a locally-appropriate CD-based computer literacy interactive textbook to be used for free by any Cameroonian school or organization, running technology contests and camps for youth, advising local technology entrepreneurs, building community computer labs and training people to run IT education programs.
Four years later, I design and manage technology-for-education programs for NGOs. One colleague founded an IT for development NGO out of Amsterdam and travels around the world leading venture capitalism and the building of technology hubs in Africa- real TED talk type stuff, The other two became consultants at big name firms. Actually, one apparently just retired in his 30s. Not so bad!
Or we might not come in at all and “work from home”.
I’d be curious how they retired in their 30s working at big name consulting firms. I know how much consultants make at the biggest name firms and it’s generally not enough to retire in your 30s.
I think that’s a pretty good philosophy so long as you can find something to do that people will pay you for. Fact is, a large part of any job is doing stuff I’d rather not no, given the choice. Whether it’s sitting in a cube for hours or arguing with some lawyer about some stupid point I don’t care about in a contract or filling out a TPS report for my director. What I try to do is find companies that are doing new and interesting things. I may jump around a lot more than someone who spent the last 30 years working in the back office of some megacorporation filling out the same form every year. But I have a lot more interesting work experience and the pay isn’t too bad either.
Also, IMHO there is a diference between tolerating a job 8 hours a day because I’d rather be doing something else and tolerating working for or with jerks in a shitty boring company.
“Never do anything you don’t want to do” doesn’t mean you are going to do your favorite thing all the time. But most people have a pretty big bank of things they find interesting, and some of that has got to be marketable. And yeah, sometimes you are playing the long game and paying your dues so you can get somewhere else. But if your heart has a dream, work steadily and tirelessly towards that dream and either it will happen, or you can at least say you gave it your best shot- and all that steady and tireless work will have gotten you somewhere, and it’s probably a better place than wherever you’d be just going through the motions at something you’re not into.
Around the time that I was looking at Peace Corps, I got an offer for a stable well-paid generic office job at some kind of office paper distributor. When I got the offer, my heart sank and I knew it was absolutely wrong for me, but it was exactly the kind of stable job everyone told me was my goal. Indeed, I got a lot of shit from all sides for not taking it. Thank goodness I didn’t listen to other people’s ideas on what I want!
As for my buddy, my guess is that he made some wise investments earlier in his career, but I’m not sure. Last time I saw him he was living in Germany doing some kind of IT stuff.
This is an important point. It is not possible to quantify how much a positive enviroment and team can mean to being able to tolerate that cubicle farm.
even sven - I was a lot like you when I was young (wanderlust). I was able to satisfy my travel needs here and there, but I did accept more than a few job opportunities in lieu of continuing my footloose-and-fancy-free-ways. I hear you about the heart sinking knowing what I was giving up in order to do what everyone expected me to do. I would say that is good advice for the OP - follow what your heart is telling you, and make a plan to get there.
My job is my calling, and I’d never tell anyone to ignore what they want to do, but there is one important thing I want to note: doing what you love only works if you love something. For example, I have a friend who has always been incredibly unwilling to go into anything or to invest any time building towards any career because none of them sound great to her. So she’s wandered from one lousy retail job to another, and the lifestyle that was livable at 25 turns out to be horrific poverty at 35 when you are thinking about things like babies and retirement and root canals. She never wanted to start down any career path because what if she didn’t like it? It’s like dating anyone because you can’t see yourself married to any of them.
So don’t let all the options freeze you into immobility. Pick something, make a plan, work it. If it doesn’t take shape the way you hoped, have faith that something else will arise and you can modify as needed.
I completely agree, at least for me. Finding a job doing something I love seems like a really great way to ruin something I love. There’s nothing that I love enough that I want to do it every day all day. There’s nothing I love to do that I love doing at eight in the morning on a Monday. I prefer to find a job that is something I don’t mind doing. It fills the time, I can concentrate on it, occasionally even get excited or worked up about it. But at the end of the day, I leave it behind when I leave the office. I’m not emotionally invested in it.
I do. Get in around 8, take an hour lunch (which I’m doing right now) and leave around 5. Like most salaried employees, I’ve been in the office on weekends, late into the night, or been working from home on my laptop until 1 am. But that’s a true rarity for my job. Like maybe once or twice a year tops.
I’ve worked shift work (CDN Navy-Coast Guard) for the past 35 years and you could not pay me enough to work mon-fri 8-5 or whatever for two measley days off.
Unlike the OP I was soured in school by my Japbitch grade 3 teacher…I honestly could not wait til I was old enough to quit school and the military gave me good training and experiences.