Not in school, but later. My schooling is in behavioral neuroscience but I got out of that once I saw how much work it was going to take to even get a half-way decent job in academia and, even if I did, it would interfere with other life goals like having kids and a house at a reasonable age. I was lucky enough to get out when the IT boom was just starting and have been doing it ever since. It is one area where it is still possible to be in demand as long as you keep your skills honed on the parts that can’t be offshored.
I have gotten cynical as I have gotten older and gone through a few layoffs however. I have come to realize that all jobs from flipping burgers to being in upper level management are basically the same thing - paid and expendable whore (no offense to any real whores there). It makes no difference to me what I do except for the level of pay and the schedule. I don’t differentiate between professions much at all except for what you get from it monetarily/effort expended. If cleaning sewers wasn’t the highest paying thing out there, I would find a way to tolerate it just like I would any of them. In all jobs you are expected to show up, do something for some set amount of time, deal with a bunch of rules and regulations, train or be trained, and deal with politics. The only thing different at the end is the pay.
Yes, absolutely. I like the security money brings-I’m not saying I dream about millions a year but I have the right degrees and experience such that I won’t work for anything lower than 100K+. Even my recent summer internship offers were at this rate.
However, I was raised in the type of family where we consider our undergrad degree the equivalent of a high school degree and so neither I nor my parents particularly cared about what I studied at that point. The one thing I’d change is adding a quantitative major to my undergrad liberal arts degree. My sister graduated in something sciencey + marketing and she had way more job flexibility after college (before she went back to school).
Nope. When I was in college, I had three goals: avoiding the draft, realizing my full human potential, and saving the world. (In that order.)
My father, on the other hand, wanted me to eventually get an actual job. But being a child of the Depression, he wasn’t thinking so much about getting rich as having permanent job security. His classic career advice was “don’t get into any job where they can replace you with someone half your age at half your salary.”
Not even a little bit. I’ve always just wanted something interesting that I’m passionate about. During my school years I considered everything from Ph.D. in psychology** to botanist to ESL instructor. You’ll notice those careers do not have average salary as a common theme. I ended up majoring in Spanish literature. I’ve generally been way more concerned with getting a first-rate education than getting a high-paying job.
**and now trying to support my husband through his own Ph.D. program, all I have to say is NO WAY IN HELL.
For my master’s studies I chose macro-level social work because it allows me to take an academic approach to social problems and programming. I love it. I can’t even imagine doing anything else. I live a solidly middle class lifestyle and I’d be happy the rest of my life with what I have right now. That said, I am going to graduate in less than two months and now my attention is shifting away from education and more toward professional development. Still could care less about money though. As long as we’re putting in for retirement, paying the bills and have a little extra for an occasional movie or video game, I’m cool.
No, I was fiercely anti-materialist as a teenager (and still am, up to a point – I mean, it’s pretty safe to say that I didn’t become an English professor for the big bucks, although I have considerably more appreciation for the things money can do now that I’m older). Besides, I was blithely confident that if I studied what I loved, things would fall into place somehow, and they did.
First time through. Nope - majored in Film Studies (Art History, actually, but Film Studies was the emphasis). I have minors in History and Women’s Studies!
Second degree… sort of…Accounting. I made more before I went back to school than I’d make as an accountant, but the practical degree is nice.
I wanted to be a writer (journalism, or novels, or both!), a paleontologist (iirc from my research you could go academics & research or oil and gas), I briefly flirted with the thought of Gaelic studies, but what would I do with THAT?
I always circled around accounting though, and that’s where I ended up. I’ll never be a high powered rolling in the dough accountant but when I went to college I was choosing for job stability since that’s what was ingrained in me since I was a child.
I’m in school now and it plays a huge role. Unfortunately I hate math and science, so there goes those career fields. I’d be a teacher but the pay isn’t worth it.
I don’t think the OP meant to include higher education when he said ‘school.’ Your aims at college age tend to be more realistic compared to when you’re, say, 12.
Anyway, I always had two career goals, one being a dream job - writer/director, which I knew was unlikely to pay the rent for at least a while even if I did actually do it, so I had a practical job aspiration too: VT editor. The only reason I was that specific is because of noticing Mykola Pawluck’s name in the credits for most of the shows I loved and finding out what a VT editor did. Something similar was fine by me - basically, being on the crew of TV or movies.
I got really close - I was doing live VT edits for Associated Press Television News when I was 21 - but was scuppered by my health; untreated narcolepsy and VT editing do not mix well. I might kinda be on my way back, in a roundabout way.
On one hand, I figured out when my age was in single digits that at some point I wanted to be economically independent (“have my own house and be able to pay for my own books”), and that the best way to ensure this appeared to involve some sort of college degree. Vocational training would have started at 14, the choice at that age was vocational school or college-track high school and of course you needed to have decided in advance to get the paperwork in order.
On the other hand, my basic economic needs haven’t gone very far beyond that. Just last week we were talking about how much money it would take to buy our votes (indirect vote-purchasing via social programs is a huge part of Spanish politics and the focus of a current scandal): I said “none, I’m way over my economic need, so any money they gave me would just be going to the piggy; if I didn’t have enough to cover my economic needs that would be a different situation altogether”. One of my coworkers said “ok, how about a seat in Parliament?” “The Ministry of Science and Technology and it’s a deal”; he laughed and said “well, everybody has a price!” “Yeah, but mine ain’t money, not right now”.
When I was looking at possible majors I did take into consideration “what kind of jobs do they lead to”, but I was more worried about “can I picture myself being happy doing that under the conditions required to fulfill these minimal financial needs?” than about “which majors lead to more money?”
Of the three things that interested me, I chose the one with most job security - engineering. I was vaguely aware of the salary but it was not important.
Yes, salary was an influence. Frankly, that’s why I didn’t become a teacher. Job security was also important, as I’m not much of a risk taker. I also thought (at the time) that I would never want to go to grad school for anything. So, a B.S. in engineering made perfect sense to me. Salary did not effect which type of engineering I chose. EE was most interesting, so that’s what I did.
Not in the slightest. I wanted to be a paleontologist, but I signed up to do pre-med when I started college because my parents were doctors and I couldn’t think of anything else to do. I wound up majoring in political science because I hated it less than everything else.
When I was in elementary school I wanted a cool job, fighter pilot or demolitions expert. Once I got into high school I realized that my free time is more important then my working time so i wanted a job where I would be rich so I could enjoy my free time and a job that I didn’t have to work very hard or dress nicely. In college I picked my major so I could be rich and travel the world.
So, yes, most of the time I’ve thought about a job I wanted to be rich.
I didn’t start thinking about employment until my last year of college, so I’ll have to say no. But I’m well into my 30s and still not very motivated by money.
My cousin and I were talking about this recently - when we were teenagers, we weren’t really sure how, but we just knew we were going to “make it” someday. This involved cars and houses and tropical islands, but nothing in the way of career planning. Fast forward to my 30s, and I’m just now realizing and planning toward that tropical island.
I came from a solid middle class background, where job security was important, and a nice middle class life was something to shoot for. We were told “college” but not why or how or to what end, in terms of actual numbers.
Thankfully, my 14 year old daughter, along with everyone in her high school, goes through a class which is basically career planning. It includes a 9 week unit where the students pick something to be, and then pick what they want to have in financial terms, and then try to fit their career hopes into their financial hopes. It’s quite a shock to the students, and it’s handled very well, with an eye toward not crushing their dreams.
I wish I’d had that in school. As stated above, when you’re young, $25,000 a year doesn’t seem that much different from $100,000 a year.
