How Did You Choose Your Current Occupation.

[Maine farmer]

As I consider the possibility of myself living a cow - free lifestyle in my future, and considering a future career, I became curious about how people end up in their occupations. 

Edited February 3, 2017 by Farming guy

[CraigD]

In 1968, age 8, I saw 2001: A Space Odyssey. Of course, like hordes of children of the 60s, I continued to want to be an Astronaut, but, captivated by the idea of artificial intelligence present in the movie’s HAL character, and the idea of people might really creating such a thing ("I am a HAL 9000 computer. I became operational at the H.A.L. Plant in Urbana, Illinois, on the 12th of January, 1992. My instructor was Mr. Langly, and he taught me to sing a song ... "), I remember thinking, and family members recall I began saying “I want to be a computer programmer when I grow up”.

 

Over the next 15 years, I tried out many possible occupations with varying levels of seriousness, from priest to mystic to gamer to writer to fine artist to car mechanic and so on, but whenever the opportunity presented itself – that is, whenever I could lay hands on an actual computer, not an easy thing in the 1970s – found myself caught up in programming. I did enough “dirty jobs”, from dishwashing to warehouse to construction work, to know I didn’t want to do more of that than I had to. In 1982, after working mostly as a tutor and as much as possible programmer (my college had some grant money for developing such stuff as educational software, which friendly faculty steered my way as much as they could), I got a degree in Math, with the vague intention of getting a higher degree in it, but was really locked onto continuing to program. After a couple of semesters teaching the same classes I’d spent the last 4 tutoring, and a few of scattered contract programming jobs, interspersed with various ne’redowellery, in 1986, I got a full time programming job, essentially the same one I have now.

[exchemist]

I chose to take early retirement from Shell after over 30 mostly interesting years in their lubricants business. I had a wife with cancer (who has since died) and a young son, so it seemed sensible to take the redundancy offer while it was open, in order to be free to take care of them. The Shell career was something I fell into after an initial experiment as a patent agent. Both were things open to someone with a chemistry degree. My choice of degree was nothing to do with career planning - it was just what interested me most at school. I still think that is the right way to choose what to study at university. You need to love it. The rest is whatever you can do with what you have learnt. 

[DrKrettin]

As I consider the possibility of myself living a cow - free lifestyle in my future, and considering a future career, I became curious about how people end up in their occupations. 

 

Likewise, my choice of degree was what interested me at school - physics.and maths. it was kind of automatic to finish up in computer programming, which I hated. I hated it so much that I gave it all up and bought a farm. I had a romantic notion of being able to work hard physically all day and read lots of books in the evenings. The reality was that I was too tired to read much. 

 

I had a neighbour who was clearly dissatisfied with being a dairy farmer, having taken it over reluctantly from his parents. With a little encouragement, he signed up for a degree course as a mature student at a nearby university and went on to teach physics, infinitely more content than when he was a farmer. 

 

Each to his own.

[sanctus]

I agree with exchemist, I studied Astrophysics because I was a SF-fan, I never cared about "what can I do with it after" (that is a big privilege we have here in the west); I remember talking with my prof about my future topic for my master's thesis and when I told her about my interest of SF and said something about wormholes and when she replied "I wrote a paper on the possibility of explaining the CMB-anisotropies with wormholes", I was quite shocked realising that all SF-things like wormholes are actually also considered in real science.

I ended up where I am now (data scientist, making an app) just because after finishing my PhD and leaving academia (did not feel like travelling the world for the next 10 years) I asked myself what can I do? I did my PhD on data analysis in Cosmology, so I dropped the "Cosmology" part and looked for jobs in data-analytics.

So, my advice is: change to something you love, then you will find work in it, because you will be motivated to search for it.

[wiseshopper]

I choice my job by the present opportunities that knocks in front of me. I always grab one that fits my interest all the time.