What to do when you don't know what to do with your life.

Miscellaneous and Personal Stuff I Must Share
21

I did a one year postdoc with another professor, then got an industry job with a starry-eyed startup that thought my grad group knew what we were doing and could, you know, accomplish things. If you’re ever very bored, dig through the Workplace Griping thread in the Pit to see how that ended. Not well. After nearly four years on the job I had a baby and quit. Four weeks later the rest of my group were laid off, and the company has now been bought and gutted. My project is permanently cancelled.

I could have stayed in academia, but I realized that in order to get a professorship you have to spend a lot of years of your life moving to a different postdoc/temporary professorship/grant project every year. I was so burned out that I took the easy, industry money instead.

22

See, I am a bit of a weirdo and I always tell the truth.* When those (hopefully) well-meaning relatives ask what my plans are I would explain that I didn’t think I would be at this stage of my life and still not know where I was heading. I would also follow that up by asing them for advice. Extended families are great for networking and can often give suggestions that you may not have thought of. It also makes them feel helpful and appreciated.

As to what to actually do with your life, may I suggest getting into the trades? They are still in short supply and while you will likely have to work for a while with little or no pay, it should be worth it in the long run.

*With the exception to some questions whose truth could lead to my death like, ‘do I look fat in this?’ or ‘isn’t my baby adorable?’

23

I don’t think you understand what people mean (or what I meant).

I seriously doubt that your hobby was “teaching people to ride horses”. Your interest was probably more like “horses” or “horseback riding”, right? It was you engaging in the act of riding horses, or caring for horses that you loved, not teaching other people to ride them.

Well, there are lots of ways to make money that would let you ride horses and be around them all the time: wrangler, dude ranch owner/employee, farm hand, rancher, stunt man (I know a guy who was a performer at Medieval Times in Orlando and the Excalibur in Las Vegas for more than 20 years riding horses as a jousting knight, for instance), etc. All of those professions have different levels of pay, hours, work conditions, environments, etc., but I know people who either make a good living doing them or else are owners (like ranchers) where that’s just what they do.

When I quit college to work professionally in theatre, I struggled for quite a few years. Now, however, I make a great living doing something I enjoy. I go to work happy and enthusiastic and if I need to stay and work overtime (a frequent occurrence in entertainment-related fields), I don’t mind because it just means I’m going to be around people I like, doing something I like, while making even more money than normal. Win win win.

I’m glad you are happy with your life now, but I don’t think you quite understood the advice offered, nor do I think you assessed your job prospects in the area you were interested in very well if the only possible way to make money by riding horses you could come up with “teach other people to ride horses”.

OTOH, not all things are a good fit for all people, and sometimes the things we think we love, when we are exposed to them 24/7 (as it were) become a burden rather than a joy; perhaps that was what happened to you.

24

It’s rather presumptuous of you to conclude that what I really liked about teaching, wasn’t teaching. I assure you it was (I was also barn manager at the farm, for the record). It was also the only area in which I had aptitude and the opportunity. Maybe you think “being a rancher” is something you can do as easy as falling off a log, but most people come by their land the old-fashioned way: they inherit it. More to the point, working with animals, is a physically crushing, 24/7, low pay, highly skilled, dangerous occupation, seasonal in many places, and highly affected by the economy, where very few can succeed in any realistic monetary way. I simply don’t have that kind of interest to put in the level of work and sacrifice. That’s the thing about “hobby work” usually it means sacrificing nearly everything else to have it: a fixed a address, a steady income, health insurance, to name a few. My best friend owns a fairly “sucessful” by most measures training farm, and they’d be under years ago if it weren’t from her husband’s non-farm income. She hasn’t drawn a salary in years, and both her parents work there too, also without pay.

. In my observation this is what happens MOST of the time; the rule not the exception. Unlike you, I don’t think this means you don’t “love” the thing. I think it means you can’t love it on someone else’s schedule.

25

At your age, you’d be a damned fool not to try.

Don’t get me wrong; “do what you love and the rest will fall into place” is very often trite and unhelpful. When the bills are due and the kids need to eat and all the rest, you have to be realistic about sucking up what you gotta suck up to make money. Trust me on this – I’m enrolling in an MBA program next fall.

But you aren’t there yet. Just out of college, no obligations, no major bills (?) … do what sounds fun and exciting, and see if you luck into a dream gig. There will be plenty of time to be practical.

26

A quote popped out of the back of my memory - it may have been from a book I read eons ago: When you don’t know what do to, do something! To me that means you need to take some kind of action - any kind of action - don’t just think about what you *should *do. You’re young, and the choice you make right now won’t necessarily set the path for the rest of your life. And in the grand scheme of things, that really doesn’t matter, because there will be other choices, and the more you experience, the better you’ll get at making good choices.

My own career path: I went to college to study foreign languages with an eye to teaching in middle school. Partway into the first semester, I found I hated being in college, altho I did hang in for a full year.

I went on a few job interviews and discovered that despite 3 years of part time office work experience, I had nothing to offer that would pay the rent. So I talked to a Navy recruiter and enlisted to get electronics school. I knew nothing about electronics and never really cared about it, but they told me they’d teach me, so what the heck…

While in the Navy, I decided I wanted to become an officer, and I was selected for a program where my job would be going to school to get my engineering degree. Again, I knew nothing about engineering and never considered it a career path, but what the heck…

After I graduated and was commissioned, I owed the Navy 5 years of my life, and it didn’t take long for me to discover that I sucked as an officer and maybe I’d made a bad choice. About a year before my obligation was fulfilled, I met and married my husband, and I returned to the civilian world about a week after I paid back my 5 years.

At that point, I discovered it wasn’t easy to get a job as an engineer where we lived, so I taught Algebra for a semester at the local junior college and worked in their financial aid department. While there, I met a woman who was married to a man who worked with the man who hired me for my first engineering job - behold the power of networking. And I spent the next 26 years as an engineer.

Now I’m newly retired, getting bored, and looking for something else to do with my time. All I know for certain is I don’t want to work retail, sales, or food service. After the holidays and our scheduled cruise in January, I’ll be looking in earnest.

Moral of the story - nothing is set in stone if you don’t want it to be. Just start somewhere and go from there. OK, it does help if you don’t start in some soul-sucking hell hole…

Oh, and at one point, I was working with a guy who did photography on the side. Granted, he spent far too many of his working hours doing his side business on the phone, but the business was growing - for all I know he went into that full time.

Good luck to you!

27

I have an undergrad degree in philosophy and practiced for 5 years as a federal attorney and got into a ton of decent business schools (Duke, UCLA, UMich, Darden, Carnegie Mellon, NYU). The only 2 schools that didn’t interview me the year that I applied were MIT and Dartmouth.

In my opinion having a “different” or career-switching background gave me a solid leg up on getting in to school. Where it kind of hurts is in recruiting, especially if you are making a huge career switch and/or don’t have a traditional business background AND you’re not the best at interviewing. However, in spite of the fact that I dropped out of IB at the last minute and did a minimum of networking I talked my way into 4 internship offers last year and have a full time gig post-graduation already. I will say that I made a concerted effort this year, however.

I will also agree with msmith about the jobs paying really well. I made more as a summer intern than I did as a GS-14 attorney. It makes me feel angry over all the years I spent practicing law when I could have been playing on Powerpoint for a better income. Plus, the thing about the haziness of the degree is pretty apt. I’ll have concentrated in “Marketing” though in all honesty the only thing I am really “using” from school is a decent understanding of stats.