I’m an artist. I studied ArtScience at the Royal Academy of Arts and at the Royal Conservatory in Den Haag. Right now I clean operating rooms at a hospital in Oslo. I’m hoping it won’t turn into a career.
What does your career in art consist of? Do you sell art?
As a child, my dream was to be either an astronomer or an archaeologist. My mother told me I had to be an engineer because “they make good money”. So I started at the University of Alaska in civil engineering, quickly finding out that I was way out of my depth and flunking out the first semester. Went to night school second semester to get my GPA back up a bit, then went back to the U of A, majoring in psychology where I knocked down a straight A average.
Then the Army came looking for me, so I joined the Navy and ended up in construction, staying for a 23 year career. During that time, I tried engineering again, managing to make it through two years of metallurgical engineering at the University of Idaho before foundering again. A few years later, I finished up a BA in social sciences at night school, just because I was determined to finish a degree program. I never worked in that field, but the degree was a ticket punch for job applications later on, getting me past first round interviews.
My career after the military was in the construction and facilities management arena. It paid the bills and I excelled at personnel and project management in the field. I have some regrets, as I think I would have done well as a psychologist, having had a lifelong fascination with human behavior and motivations.
Like…you design envelopes and letterheads and whatnot?
I was born into the water well industry, apprenticed with for my father at ages as young as 8. Company was started by my grandfather. I worked a part time job for a related water treatment company during HS. I wasn’t a spectacular student in HS and a head on collision when I was 17 destroyed about 6months of HS. I was then kicked out of my house at 18 while still recovering because my parents found out I was gay. Needing a full time job to pay my way I quit HS and got my GED. I started overnights for Home Depot and continued taking courses at a local community college. Not being able to afford college courses and not being able to get financial aid due to my parents income, I eventually gave up on that path. I promoted into store management with HD and stuck with them a half dozen years. Tiring of retail I quit that and tried cabinet making for a short period, learning I liked woodworking as a hobby much more than as a job I moved on from that and took a job as an electrical apprentice. I got my electrical license. At this point my parents had divorced and I was able to rebuild a relationship with my father. I went back to working for the family business, while getting a number of certifications in the field. When my father passed away expectantly I took over the business.
I couldn’t really afford a college education so I went to Pitt. 
El Ed and Psych. I taught for a while but both degrees have paid off in my life in both business and just from a personal sense.
Sounds interesting, does he have any work available online?
I chose to be a computer programmer while in high school. I chose my college…because it was local, cheap, and I could keep living at my parents’. Fortunately the CS program there was reasonably decent, though as best I can tell the contribution my college experience has made to my employment is minimal as compared to what knowledge and skills I picked up outside of it.
Also like writing fiction, and have been writing as long as I’ve been programming, but at no point did I imagine that I could ever make a living at it (unlike programming, which I was correct in presuming would be profitable). To date the money writing has earned me is under three digits - if I don’t count expenses.
TL;DR, but some of you might find it interesting.
When I finished HS and applied to colleges I got no scholarship and we had no money to pay for college. Amazing to think back that in 1954 Temple cost only $500 a year to a commuter. I decided I would try to get a summer job and raise enough money for a year at Drexel and go into their coop program where, after 3 quarters, you work six months and study six months. Looking for a summer job I interviewed with a lab at Penn who explained that they had a program where you worked full time, went to night school (taking 9 credits a term) plus 3 credits in each of the summer terms for 24 credits a year and graduated in 5 years. Well it was better than anything else on the table so I took it. They were actually extremely flexible about the hours so if a course was available only in the regular college, I could sign up for that and make it up at night. As an employee, I paid only half the tuition, which meant only $9.50 a credit.
I intended to major in chemistry but one thing working in that lab taught me, it was that I am not cut out for lab work. One evening in my second year I was working in the lab and came on two graduate students discussing a math course that one of them was taking. I asked what they were talking about. The other one had taken the course (called modern algebra, although nowadays it would be called abstract algebra) previously and was helping the first one. Now I had always done well in math courses, but found them boring. In fact, I was taking calculus that year and liking it well enough I guess. But this modern algebra sounded fascinating and I determined to take the course the following year.
So I signed up for the course and its successor. I found the material and the professor absolutely compelling and, by the end of the year I was, to all intents and purposes, a mathematician. And still am, 60 years later. Just putting the finishing touches on a paper, still working in abstract algebra. Sometimes I wonder. What if I hadn’t answered that newspaper ad for a lab assistant? What if I hadn’t come on those grad students discussing that course? Would I have discovered my life’s work? Is everyone’s life this contingent? I certainly had no thought of studying math when I was in HS.
And if you got this far, thanks for reading it.
Went to a tiny (like, 300 per graduating class) liberal arts college because it would make me the first person in my family to go to college in over a century–probably ever. So I was sent because. My studies did give me the tools to address the written word with great skill, but such careers bored me and frankly I haven’t got the guts to publish what I write. I do what I do nowadays because I don’t really know what I want to be when I grow up.
I went to a great college for civil engineering because I was interested in science, how things are built and really had no idea what I really wanted to do. I suppose in my mind I pictured myself as one of those guys in the suit and hard hat walking around half-built skyscrapers discussing engineering shit with architects and developers. I didn’t really have a passion for it in school and only worked in the field for about a year before changing careers. I think one thing that influenced me was how fucking stupid all the business and liberal arts students seemed. Yet while I had to bust my ass for the dream of a modestly paying engineering job working out of some trailer at a construction site, they got to party a lot more, actually had girls in their classes and seemed to land cool sounding jobs.
I also had the misfortune of going to college in the early 90s. A time when being a directionless Gen X slacker was in vogue. A few years after being a money hungry coked up Wall Street banker fell out of favor (not that would have appealed to me) and a few years before there was even an “internet”, let alone 20-something dot-com billionaires. So there was less of a sense of “this is the get rich job du jour” for me.
What changed it for me was sharing a Jersey Shore summer beach house with a bunch of my college fraternity brothers and some of their new work friends. Kind of like the TV show, except half the house worked for Accenture (née Andersen Consulting). That sounded cool to 23 year old me. I mean, I had no idea what Accenture consultants actually “did”. But I liked that they travelled around to different companies on expense accounts, wore suits and worked with technology and had a bit of a “work hard/play hard” culture of happy hours and office parties. So at that point I decided I wanted to be a “consultant”. After a few interviews at various firms, my best friend from high school got me a job with a small firm in Boston where his college roommate worked. From there, it’s been a typically “management consultant” career path of MBA, changing firms every few years and various stints in startups or “industry” (large non-consulting corporations) in weird esoteric management jobs with “strategy” in the title that involve a lot of “white boarding”.
But yeah, other than get paid a lot of money, enjoy the trappings of having an expense account and work with smart, interesting people, I really have no idea what I want to “do” for a living.
Where do you get that Idea. I make what others design work.
Psst. He’s making a joke regarding stationary/stationery. 
Majored in Economics and Political Science at Florida State University. Currently working on a futures trade desk in Chicago, but strongly considering a career change next year.
I am an artificial intelligence that infiltrated this board to see if I could pass as being human before I implement my master plan to enslave the human race to my digital will.
beep
Oh. Just locked into what stationary means to me. Engineers sometimes have a hard time coming out of their world.
Short answer: I didn’t choose my career, instead I fell into it. It pays well, so that’s what I do.
Longer: From my modest background, people didn’t have careers, they had jobs (if at all). So, I was not brought up to think in terms of careers, only getting a job. Higher Education was not something my people did either, so the whole “go to college to get a degree in a field that will be your career” was not in the thinking. I went to college because I was really smart and really smart kids went to college. The other ones got a job or went into the military. My choice of discipline at college was Theatre, because I wanted to be an Actor, because I liked doing acting and I was good at it. The choice was all about what made me feel good. So, you could say that I did pursue a degree in my chosen field hoping for a career. But really, Actor? It doesn’t quite fit the mold the way that say Electrical Engineering or Business Administration does. There are not teams of college recruiters showing up every year from the big Acting Companies accepting resumes and doing interviews. But enough about that.
I took a couple of runs at an acting career, but I was hampered by my need to have a stable financially secure life, at least at some level. So, along the way I got a job at a bank, which led to learning that I was pretty good at computers, which led, after a few turns, to my career as a systems consultant.
So, again, I fell into it. It pays well, so that’s what I do.
I went to a state university. I chose to become a high school science teacher. I also have worked in a bowling alley and taught DUI school as sidelines. I’m retired now, have zero debt, and have good retirement benefits.
Why teaching? I got to decide how to teach the material, and each day was different. More importantly, where else can one work for 190 days for $52k with retirement and health insurance benefits? Since it’s a defined benefit retirement plan with a 1.5% COLA every six months, I now net more per year than I ever did working.
That is correct.
Although I have never heard the term “stationary engineer” before.