Feel free to be economic with the truth by using aliases for organizations and products wherever it protects your privacy or your contracts. I’m mainly interested to hear about your unique experience.
Example follow-up questions: What was most rewarding, what was not? What was not a great use of your time but maybe still a learning experience? What were you interested when you were younger (for hobbies or otherwise) that may have helped guide you?
I have 2 college degrees and install cable tv for a living.
Figure out what you want to do. Dont wait until grade 12 to start thinking about your future.
deleted by creator
IT in general.
Don’t pigeonhole yourself to a technology. Move with the times to stay relevant.
Alternatively, be extremely good at something hard.To bad I can’t capitalize on self-sabotage. I like I’m extremely good at it. Oh and it’s reeeeaaaalllllllyyyy hard to deal with.
Second generetions software engineer. 19 years. It’s been good. I’d recommend folks try writing software one time somehow and if they like the puzzle solving bits look into it more. The market is really saturated for new grads now so it has to be something you love.
I’m a software engineer because I’m bad at everything else. Barely made it through college physics class and highschool chemistry. Wanted to do English but can’t write. Didn’t want to follow in my mom’s footsteps but I just can’t so anything else well. Came around in college after a pretty bad first semester.
I was kind of a slacker in school. I did ok, but the pressure I see on kids these days would have killed me.
I made it through a computer science degree because it was fun for me. So much puzzle solving. Even the theoretical stuff was fun. I had a professor who everyone thought was really easy. Folks were getting like 98/100 in the whole class. I think, though, he just tought well. We got it. He made it easy.
These days I work on data things. Nothing fancy. All open though so googling my name will find it. It’s honest work. I got here accidentally. I was taking random tasks and worked on search once time. Was kind of fun. When that job went belly up I spent a while working for something cool. I found a job I was unqualified for but sort of bluffed my way into. Learned a lot.
While I was there I built a search thing that, terrifyingly, is built right into Firefox. Go to the location bar, type
@w, hit tab, and type a word. That was me for a while. I’m proud of it. It’s no google, but it’s honest.Been working in search and data stuff ever since. I don’t deserve it. It’s been good. But I got lucky.
Tried to GED in 10th grade. Weasled through the rest of high school making deals with teachers to just take final exams. 3 years of linguistics studies in college with no clue where that was headed. Boyfriend, pregnant, married, and random jobs as we moved to different states for his job. Burned my arm and had to go to physical therapy. Stoned on painkillers and amazed by how cool the gym was, i applied to therapy school. Now i work with school kids with physical disabilities. I’m in my car driving from school to school most days and my summers are free. I love that i have an office but don’t have to go there, i get to go outside and see the sun every day, each day is different, i get to work with/on some cool equipment, and working with kids is better than working with adults. I hate my special ed leadership team because they’re selfish, disrespectful assholes who care more about moving up than taking care of our school kids. If i had to do it over, i would change nothing. I would have been to immature to do this job and appreciate it as a younger person.
Volunteered in a life science research lab in high-school due to a mix of high school requirement and parental connections.
Went to college, had some personal shit that meant I didn’t really do internships or the like. Liked mol bio but had been aiming for vet school since I was like 5. Tried for vet school and got very denied (meh grades and probably subpar rec letters relatively speaking not to mention a lack of spots for out of state residents).
Got a job in bone research (~25k/y) and moved back to the south. Dad convinced me to try for med school but I realized patient interaction was not for me. Then decided on PhD(30k/y). Got in and moved up north. Finally finished (fairly recently actually), met and married wife during the PhD but had to stick in the area for her so started a postdoc. So now I get 54k/y until the university catches up to the NIH saying 60K (after the recommending committee said at least 70k to stop losing everyone to industry and let people be able to live…).
After wife is able to move, not sure what’s next. I’m going to try for professorship or I’ll have to go to industry.
Be 18. Get scholarship. Study literature. Drop out. Run away. Join a protest movement. Be homeless at MIT for a while. Find job. Get hurt at said job. Get workers injury insurance payment after 2 years of recocery. Go back to school for math. Be good at math. Found tech related non profit. Spend 6 months in Kurdistan, setting up wifi. Finish math school. Fuck it, get masters because good at math. Get hired by foreign company oversees to work on self driving cars. Doesn’t work. Won’t work. Quit. Go to Greece, teach refugee kids how to us MS office. Watch neo Nazis burn down refugee school and computer lab. Suddenly it’s March of 2020 (COVID) and nothing to do because Nazis and no more computer lab. Oh fuck. Find PhD program in “trustworthy ai” to figure out why car not work. Prove car never work. Get PhD. Get paid to critique AI and play on super computers while working from home and having zero day to day oversight. Get paid to travel the world. Get paid to shit on Google, Facebook , Openai, and Tesla.
I went from homeless to visiting my 40th country in 10 years, while having a PhD.
No regrets.
Based as fuck. Shame about the Nazis though, those poor kids didn’t deserve to have their school burnt down for existing.
well, the German Neo Nazi who came to town maaaaaay have gotten assaulted by somebody using a big ass bicycle lot and escorted off the island.
yes, yes violence is bad, but literal Nazis are worse.
Nice. More of them to get a taste of their own medicine. The time line is awful, I didn’t know Greece had so much violence against immigrants. Second link was broken though.
must be your client. the link works fine for me. If you see the timeline, locals mostly weren’t involved and lots of local anti fascists organized and fought back. This island was nominated for the Nobel prize when the crisis started, but there’s only so much people can take when the refugees kept coming, the island couldn’t support thousands of extra people, and refugees were forced to cut down centuries old olive trees for cooking fuel. Greece is not a wealthy country and they felt betrayed by places like Sweden and Germany that have robust economies and a much smaller proportion of the refugee crisis.
Something had to give. Moria camp is essentially an open air prison without running water or showers. Most people who arrive are children, or were before they walked to Turkey from the Congo or Afghanistan or whatever and boarded boats for a chance at a better life.
I heard stories from teenagers who had escaped slavery or been forced to work in fast fashion factories in Turkey without pay or had their passports stolen in Iran or picked up by a militia in the Syrian civil war and handed a weapon. And the EU just leaves them there. They get like €200 a month, if and when their legal case ever concludes, but that’s not enough to actually live and they’re not allowed to work. Not like Greece has extra work anyway.
Maybe the countries that make a fortune by selling arms to conflict zones (France, Germany, Sweden, Belgium, Italy) should step up and take care of the crises they manufactured for profit. But nah, they just elect far right parties because brown people are scary.
Oh that’s nice it wasn’t a hugely shared sentiment. I skimmed a lot since I was trying to find the specific incident and all the details like deaths of babies and lynchings made it seem like the people of the island were for it since, like you mentioned, practically an open air prison. Unfair the island was burdened with so many but the conditions of the camp are awful.
Damn. That’s sick. What an amazing story.
I dropped out of college with 30 hours to go, worked a job in construction that was more or less a go-for job and I wasn’t very good at it. I had a friend who did EEGs and needed another tech. I worked at $30/hr doing EEGs. Studied my ass off and got registered, studied more and got a second registry. That enabled me to make $48/hr which is my starting pay adjusted for inflation. Long story short, I should have gone into computer science or finance and been rich. Neurodiagnostics is rewarding in it’s own way, but there is better money out there that isn’t going to make you work your ass off and claw your way back to where you started.
Ever thought about making short 2-4 minute Youtube videos answering questions about the day to day life of a EEG technician, how to get your foot in the door for EEG, where to start, is it a good fit for you (etc.)? You’d be banking on your authority that you’ve gained over the years of doing work as a EEG. Either people are curious for fun or for a more purposeful reason to watch said content. Either way, it’s worth look into imo.
There’s a guy that has put his journey up on LinkedIn, I’m also not much of a public speaker.
First job out of college was as a statistician. I couldn’t lie that much.
Then I worked as a microbiologist. It stunk.
Then I worked as a plant breeder, it was fun but the pay sucked without a Ph.D.
Took a job as and international marketing and product manager (paid the same as the PhD). Traveled all over the world. It was brutal but fun. Jetlag and stress started destroy my health.
Took a job as a consultant to farmers. It wasn’t bad until a new CEO decided to change things and lose a ton of money.
Currently working for a smaller company that basically doesn’t care what I do as long as it’s profitable. Contracting research, selling seeds & beneficial insects, etc to farmers. Set my own schedule and do my own thing. I let the CEO know what I am up too once a year or so. Spent most of the last month playing PlayStation after doing way too much this spring. Gotta pace myself after all.
I would recommend leaving on a good note. Over half of my jobs were recommended to me by people I worked with in the past.
Graduate high school at 18. Work on a vineyard as a farm hand with exclusively middle aged Hispanic men for a year. Went to Europe for a month with money saved by living in a large shed. Return to the States and attend university studying mathematics. Decide math isn’t the route for me. Transfer to another university and study horticulture, winemaking, and vineyard management. While studying, got a job at a hazelnut farm. Worked there for 1.5 years while finishing degree. Decide farming isn’t quite right for me. Decide to try law school. Take LSAT. Score well enough. Apply and obtain scholarship at a law school a few hours away. Move to new city and do law school. While in law school, worked at several firms and distric attorney offices. Graduate and study for the bar exam. Pass bar exam. Work full time as solo attorney. Very stressful, not very much money (was making around $40,000/yr). Decide to try district attorney office. Get job offer for $80,000. Move closer to new job. Now been working at DA office for two years and am making $106,000. Much less stressed. Really good support from colleagues and staff. In line for promotion. Life is pretty good. In the future, looking to potentially become a professor/law professor as long term career to hopefully have even better work/life balance.
TBH I stumbled into it and fell in love with it upon finding it. Not exactly how I recommend people find their career but it worked for me!
Out of highschool I quit my fast food job and my mother told me to find a new job after a week or so. A friend of a friend invited me to check out their work place (machine shop) and I was in love with the machines, so I applied there. I’ve been in the industry since!
It’s been well over 10 years and I’ve only had 4 jobs so I can’t really give advice on where to look or how to find anything that fits for someone. Especially not in an economically viable way
It has been interesting. I wanted to teach at university so I went straight into a PhD program after my 4 year engineering degree. Found out that being a professor, at least at an ivy league school, was 10% teaching and 90% funding and politics, also did not mesh well with available projects and support, dropped out with “half a PhD”. Worked 12 years at steel mills, the first one sucked but I learned a lot, the second one really developed me into who I am now from an entrepreneurial and leadership POV. Went to business school at night and simultaneously got a Manager job at a shitty company, got fired, got an engineer job elsewhere and quickly promoted to manager where I rocked the house. Left for a senior engineer role elsewhere with better pay and work life balance and I am loving it so far.
Lots of luck, lots of effort, lots of learning through failure and success. Best thing I did was probably business school. The engineering degree is what gets me in the door but the tools I learned in getting my MBA have proven more valuable because most of the problems I need to solve are not exclusively engineering problems.
It was really weird to go from a high performer at one company to getting fired at the next. Thankfully I’ve had two great experiences since then, so I guess it was probably them not me. Getting fired messed with my concept of self worth for a bit but I have worked through that now.
There is always an element of luck, but we do have to be prepared to leverage that luck. Thanks for sharing!
I feel like I should have pursued my first choice college more, because it was a big 10 public college while the second choice was a private liberal arts college. By far the most rewarding thing in my career has been my part in winning the fight to organize my union. I didn’t realize it then, but now it seems clear that my interests and actions throughout my life have led me to a career as an activist.
This one starts back in high school:
Have plans to enter West Point, build a military career, retire from the military at 50 and do civilian work for fun to pass the time. Get shot in the eye with a bb gun at 14, which ends all military aspirations. Pick the second choice college because they accepted me first with a scholarship. Go to college for physics, but listen to the guidance counselor about the 7 week intro web programming course. Drop out of physics and change major to computer science at the last possible second in the first semester of the first year. Continue to take various history courses throughout college that don’t count to a history degree. Graduate and move back in with mom for the summer. Apply to relevant jobs for over a year without success, pick up some work in grocery stores in the meantime. Quit the hometown grocery store at the end of the summer after publicly confronting the store owner about threatening to illegally deduct from my paycheck. Move in with college roommate and friend in the big city while still applying for relevant work and working at Aldi. Work with a communist store manager and have political discussions with him during the George Floyd protests and COVID. Get hired into QA for a big video game company. Walk out with the others when a major sexual harassment lawsuit is filed against the company. Walk out again when the CEO is discovered to be complicit and enabling the harassers. Walk out and go on strike when workers get laid off. Start organizing a union. Win my union.
Got IT training during my time in the military that ended up opening the door to a network engineer position with a defense contractor after I got out.
I was a pretty poor engineer, but I was good at explaining technical details to non-technical people. The bosses liked this because they wanted constant updates on what was happening, the other engineers liked this because they didn’t want the bosses to bother them, and I liked it because going to sit in briefings got me out of doing real work, so I ended up in management.
