I knew a sound designer who became a running coach.
Peter “Charlie Bucket” Ostrum is today a veterinarian.
1950s actress Dolores Hart left the silver screen in her early 20s, and became a cloistered nun.
I also read a while back about a young woman who got a full ride scholarship to Cal Tech, and after graduating, worked for a while as a science reporter for a local newspaper. She decided to return to her hometown on the East Coast, where she got an administrative job at the local Catholic diocese, and (you can probably guess where this too is heading) also became a nun herself. Last I heard, she was a science teacher at a local Catholic high school.
On a related note, “Weird Al” Yankovic has an architecture degree from Cal Tech.
I think the resemblance between the careers of Weird Al Yankovic and Tom Lehrer is interesting. Yankovic learned to play the accordion when he was young. He entered college at 16, where he studied to be an architect, graduating from California Polytechnic. He then began writing and performing parody songs. Eventually he was able to make a living from his songwriting, singing, and videos.
Tom Lehrer learned to play the piano when he was young. He entered college at 15, where he majored in mathematics, graduating from Harvard. He already wrote songs then. His song “Fight Fiercely, Harvard”, written in 1945, is still well known as a parody of fight songs. He has never made his living from his songs though. He was drafted into the army in 1955 and assigned to work at NSA. He taught part-time at UC Santa Cruz for awhile, as well as other places. A lot of his songs are available on records. Unlike Yankovic, who has basically just parodied songs, Lehrer has often tried to make political statements in his songs.
And, yes, they’re both still alive.
Michelle Meyrink was a rising young actress in the 80s when she decided that Hollywood was a bunch of bullshit, and moved to Vancouver to practice Zen Buddhism.
Cal Poly SLO. Caltech is a whole 'nother school entirely. Caltech is where the guys from Big Bang Theory work. They don’t have an architecture major.
Another couple of rock-and-roll stars turned something else…
Jason Everman of Soundgarden apparently read Benvenuto Cellini’s quote that a well rounded man is a warrior, artist, and philosopher, and subsequently quit music, became a US Army Ranger & Green Beret, serving in Iraq and Afghanistan, then went on to get a philosophy degree from Columbia, and is working on a military history degree from Norwich University.
Also, Dan Spitz, bassist of the metal band Anthrax from the 1980s, more or less retired from music, and became a world-class watchmaker. As in he makes like 3 a year, and they cost upwards of $128,000 each.
I really want to know what made you give up dolphin training.
this is the I am going to become a priest/nun impulse.
The one I remember is an essay about a bridge engineer who realized one day that all he was doing was creating structures that enabled people to get to the other side of a river or chasm and ruin that side too. So he quit – that very day, apparently – and bought a piece of land and grew vegetables on it that he sold at the farmers market. His wife left him, as she felt she hadn’t signed up for that lifestyle.
Film Actress Audrey Hepburn was a spy during WWII.
So was Josephine Baker
Film actress Hedy Lamarr was also an inventor (including working on radio-controlled torpedoes in WWII).
This sorta reminds me of one of my favorite bassists, Dave Schulthise of The Dead Milkmen. He was a PhD candidate in economics at Purdue University before joining the band. After the band broke up in the 90s, he attended Indiana University to study Serbo-Croatian history, and then moved to Serbia for work and study in 1998.
There was a government research engineer who worked in our facility from 2001 to 2013. He had a BS and MS in materials engineering. In 2013 he abruptly quit his (presumably high paying & secure) job and opened a microbrewery. It’s still going strong.
A guy started out as a Petroleum Geologist, then an Entrepreneur, owning a microbrewery in Downtown Denver…then hopped into politics, Mayor of Denver, Governor of Colorado, now one of our Senators.
I see what you did there. 
First, I was engaged to be married and wasn’t making that much money at the time, even though I had worked there on and off for five years, was a senior marine mammal trainer, and loved working with those animals. I had realized I was in the entertainment business and like most people in the entertainment industry (think Key Grip on a movie set) you don’t make a lot of money unless you are a star performer, which I wasn’t. I didn’t want to start off my married life with a glamorous but low-paying job.
Second, when I looked at the more senior people working there, guys who had worked in the business for 20 plus years, I saw they were living in crappy apartments and driving beat-up old cars. They worked there because they loved their job and they loved the spotlight. They didn’t care about their long-term financial future.
Thirdly, with all the bad press about Orcas and injuries to trainers, including one death, I didn’t have confidence that marine parks would be around for another 20 years. I no longer saw a future in that profession and I happen to be living in silicon valley just before it became “Silicon Valley”. A friend told me about an opportunity at a company making computer controlled scientific instruments and I jumped at it. While working there I went back to school and learned how to write software, and the rest is history.
I still miss working with those animals, and I no longer visit marine parks. If I had to do it over again, I would do it exactly asI did, except I wouldn’t marry my first wife, but that’s another story.
I’ll take it, though it was Unintentional
That sounds like fascinating work. When working with orcas and porpoises, did you get the sense you were working with animals with highly developed consciousness and self-awareness?
I worked with sea lions, bottlenose dolphins, and orcas. Sea lions were like smart dogs, dolphins were intelligent bullies, and orcas were dangerously smart.
They always tried to get out of their immediate enclosure and into the larger tank, or to get more food from us. They would get bored when not being trained or performing a show, and they could be incredibly stubborn, especially if they weren’t particularly hungry.
As far as consciousness and self-awareness goes, I can’t say they really showed me that… but I knew and treated them as highly intelligent animals, not equals or superior beings to humans.
My first job as a video game tester, one of my co-workers was fresh out of law school. Passed the bar and everything, but decided he wanted to work in video games instead. His parents, as I understand it, were less than thrilled.
Thing is, we ended up testing a video game that had a ton of legal issues. Mostly IP violations - they would not stop putting trademarked logos in the game that we didn’t have permission to use. I don’t know if the guy had specifically studied IP law or not, but since the legal department was involved in the testing process to an unusual degree, he ended up being the tester who worked with them directly.
Eventually, they closed the office we were working out of and laid us off - except for him. He got a job offer from the company’s legal department.
So, law school → entry level video game tester → corporate lawyer.
I know 4 people who have had some sort of personal trauma and shortly thereafter became Methodist (UMC) ministers. Not sure if there is a cause/effect relationship in any of their cases. Maybe Methodists are so hard up they’d hire anybody who can put a few words together and stand in a pulpit.
None of these four people had any sort of obvious religious inclination. None of them were sky wizard believers in their prior lives. But in each case, their magical transformation seems to have stuck. Maybe there’s something in the grape juice they serve for communion?