OT: When did you find out what you wanted to do

[warriorpoet]

I was 23, and was pushed onto stage to help our church praise band by my wife who knew better than me. Two years later I was in school learning to use my gifts, and 6 years on I love what I do.

 

Sure there were a lot of people who told me "not to put all my eggs in one basket", but you know what? I'd rather fail repeatedly and love it than settle and be miserable any day of the week. From 19-25 I "worked jobs" to support a family, and loathed every waking moment. Now I not only enjoy my time outside of the office, but the time inside too (sometimes even more ).

 

Work is enjoyable- why force yourself to hate it?

[ElectricEye]

15? I'm 39 in 4 months and still trying to figure it out. Don't stress about it. Just concentrate on doing well in school and keep busy with hobbies and friends.

Career-wise, just follow what you enjoy doing. And I mean REALLY enjoy doing. The older you get, have a family, etc. it becomes much more difficult to switch careers. You're way young. I wouldn't even remotely sweat it. You're not going to be the same person 5 years from now. 10 years or 15.

 

I'd MUCH rather be a photographer or luthier than a farking IT nerd. Still working towards that. Wish I had followed my gut 15 years ago....

[noisebloom]

It's great that you're thinking about it now. Most 15-year-olds don't. BUT, don't feel obligated to come up with an answer yet. Just concentrate on doing well in high school and look toward college.

 

Right now is a great time to start asking yourself, 'What would I like to do?' In a broad sense, what subjects or activities are you interested in? Use those as your primary motivations and go in that general direction.

 

Also, broaden your horizons and be open to new things. This is a perfect time for you to be interested in everything. Take college electives just to try them out. Art, science, programming, you name it. You might get turned onto something you never thought you would. I knew someone who, when we were teenagers, thought for sure she wanted to be a nurse. Started taking classes, volunteered, gave blood, all those things medical students do. Then at 18 she took a college geology course, having no prior interest in it whatsoever. She fell in love with it completely, switched her major and never looked back. Last I heard from her, she was on her way to earning her PhD and had done some work with NASA. So you never know what might grab hold of you.

[metallica_00]

I'm 24 and a an analyst covering the power & infrastructure industry for an investment firm. We do fixed income and private equity investments.

 

In my case, it evolved over time. During my first year of college, I found economics to be my favorite and best subject, and simultaneously saw what the Wall Street bonuses were looking like those days. But upon talking people and researching the industry, I didn't think the aggressive culture and 100-hour work weeks at the big banks were for me. So I moved more towards the money management side. Had an internship working for a mutual fund, and thought I wanted to be a public equity analyst/PM. Coming out of school, couldn't get a job in equities, but did find something in fixed income (bonds). However, shortly after getting there, my role expanded into the firm's private equity space as well. I ended up liking the private equity stuff more, and want to move away from the bond stuff to a specialized PE firm. But I'd also consider being on the finance side of an independent power developer as well. I'm also looking into going to business school.

 

Bottom line, you may have a ballpark idea of what you want to do. But you'll find you will have to take what you get, and your career will sort of shape itself as you try different things and find you like/are better at some things rather than others.

[Burgess]

Once I had decided there was no long term future for me in music, I simply looked in the newspaper (yes, we had newspapers back then) to see where the jobs were. As it turns out, the jobs were in electronics so that's where I ended up. Go figure.

[23miles]

15 is too young to start worrying about a career, although I applaud your ability to look ahead. At this point you should be worrying about your education and exploring as many things as you can. How can you know what you want to do when you don't know what your interested in. Live, experience, and, above all, read. It will come to you when you are ready.

[maltomario]

 

At a certain point it becomes less what you WANT to do and more what you can MAKE MONEY doing. I knew my senior year I wanted to study economics, but didn't know what my job would be until after graduation and really when I got my current job. Making it big in music is 99% luck anyway. I'd rather do my passion for fun in my free time than make it WORK. My opinion is to spend a couple years living at home (if possible) and take your generals at a good community college. Before graduation, identify some schools you'd like to go to and make sure they transfer credits to and from other schools. Don't waste $5-20k a year on those generals. Get a part-time job and a car and spend $2-3k a year on those worthless classes, figure out what you'd like to major in, and then transfer to a 4-year university to finish it up. That way your student loans are $100-300 a month instead of $500-1000.

 

 

excellent advice.

[imbuedblue]

 

I'm a librarian, and I figured out that I could tolerate doing it for a living at around 24. With one thing and another I didn't actually really start being a professional at it until 40. I say tolerate, because honestly if I could I wouldn't work at all. But I'm not in that position, and I haven't been willing to do the things I would have needed to have done to be in the position of not working now. So I gotta work, and this is, to me, a reasonable balance of pay, responsibility and interesting work.

 

 

I'm a librarian too, and "tolerate" is an excellent way to put it. I started as a copy-cataloger while at music school and realized it was a career path that wouldn't thoroughly stress me.

[nuke_diver]

I'll be 38 next month and I'm still trying to figure it out. 9-12 grade, I wanted to be a music education major with a specialty in early music. I was a physical chemistry major in college. Went into restaurant training and management. Worked in IT for 8 years. Started doing concrete work 7 years ago with my father in law and I take over the company later this year. Money potential is great, but I still need to get a job with proper benefits because concrete 9 months a year and plowing two months a year still won't put much of a dent in the hospital bill for my first heart attack at 45.

 

Same here but I'm way older. My current aspiration is to be retired Then I can really do what I want...if I ever figure it out

 

Oh and MS in PChem here as well

 

But I don't do anything related to chemistry in my work and haven't for about 25 yrs

[bsman]

Way back when I was 24 with a pregnant wife, half a liberal arts degree and few prospects, I decided I needed to find the degree I could complete the fastest and that would pay off in terms of steady employment. I ended up majoring in accounting, and haven't regretted it a day. I finally ended up finishing my history/english major for fun (and now have an MBA as well), but that BBS in accounting has kept me steadily employed since 1987. I can't say I've ever loved auditing or accounting, but it's given me the freedom to live my life as I wish, and I think unless you can find something you LOVE, that's about the best you can ask for!

[Hubert Stumblin]

I graduated college with a communications degree (which is hardly worth more than the paper used to print the diploma) and had absolutely no direction. I had to decide what I wanted and I thought "Well, I like music." I took a one year audio engineering course at an "audio institute" which at least had an affliliation with NYU and did a couple internships (ie. work for little or no money) at couple studios. Got a job in a music production house studio that I help build during one of my internships where I was house engineer, assistant for outside engineers, maintenance engineer, copy engineer, clean up guy, you name it. With all that experiance I got an entry level position at a studio for a major record company (with benefits, yea!). After a few years of doing various things there I took on the position for archive engineer. We were the first record company to start a digital archive program and I was instrumental in it's creation.

 

Anyway, since then I have had an incredible experiance and education in recorded musical history (the company goes back over a hundred years), musical technology history, etc. Work I've done has been used on Grammy award winning and Grammy nominated projects. It really is a job that a lot of people would think is the best job in the world to have. And in many ways it is. However, and I may sound like a jerk for saying this but there's a reason why, I wish I made more money at it. What I make would be fine had not some of the harsh realities of life intruded. My wife has been very sick. And even though my company has health benefits (thank God) the parts of the bills not covered are very high. Quite often I wish I had chosen something that pays a lot more so that at least that would be one less thing for us to be worried about.

 

So I guess I'm trying to say that while it can be really great to get a "follow your dreams" job it doesn't hurt for security's sake to get one that pays really well, too.

[aenemated]

i started learning to write code when i was about 6 years old on my older brother's TI-99.

 

i guess i figured it out pretty early, because 27 years later i'm still writing code, as an independent developer. i get contracted by various marketing/advertising firms around hollywood.

 

oh, and i still get just as excited about it as i did when i was a kid.

[Hubert Stumblin]

Oh, and somebody once said something like: "It's important that you should do well in this world. But it's more important that you should do good in it."

 

I don't know if I've achieved the former. I hope I've achieved the latter.

[ashasha]

At about your age I had decided that I would be a cardiologist or a neurosurgeon because they made good money. Unfortunately the insides of people pretty much disgust me.

 

I had a teacher tell me years ago, "find what you love to do and the money will come." Of course I thought that he was an idiot at the time.

 

Looking back on it, I think that it was a brilliant statement. If you do something based on how much money it can make you but you hate it then chances are likely that you'll suck at it and eventually work yourself out of a job and perhaps your career as word about you gets around. If you do something that you are passionate about though chances are you will dedicate yourself to it completely, excel at it and end up becoming a sought after commodity in whatever it is you are doing.

 

Where I screwed up though was knowing that coming from a very poor family with 4 younger siblings that I wouldn't have money for school. I was selected every summer to go to special camps in our state for the 'advanced kids' and my parents never let me. It wasn't because they didn't want me to excel, but because we didn't have the money and they needed me to help keep an eye on my younger brothers and sister. So basically I said screw school, skipped a hell of a lot because I was clever enough to get away with it and scraped by and graduated. I could have easily had scholarships and even taken out loans to go to school, but for some reason that didn't sync into my thick skull. Plus going to the beach instead of 4th period was a lot more fun.

 

Long story short I'm doing pretty well at almost 40 years old. I made my life a hell of a lot harder than I needed to though because when I was at your exact age I made a decision that education wasn't a priority and was boring. I chose being perceived as 'cool' to a bunch of people that I haven't seen in 20 years over securing my future. Be selfish, worry about yourself and don't care what others think because none of those people will matter after you graduate.

 

So the only thing that I can say is that you can follow one of two paths right now. You can put yourself into position to be able to decide what it is that you love and want to do or you can have it decided for you and it may not be what you want. Concentrate on school. Don't just do your homework, destroy it, make every answer that you write the absolute best that it can be. Work hard at it. Don't just memorize stuff for a test, understand it as best you can and be able to apply it. Right now your education is the most important job that you can have and it will influence the rest of your life. All the stuff that you are doing right now will translate to helping you get into a good college in any field. Without that education and those grades, your options are cut drastically.

 

Yes there are exceptions to the rule, but the bottom line is that they are exceptions and special circumstances. Take control of your future now. If I had any idea at 15 that my actions would impact the rest of my life I would have definitely taken a different path. I'm doing all right at this moment, but I'm not nearly as successful after 20 years of work as I could have been 10 years ago after college. And success isn't always about money, happiness and enjoying what you do is just as important. Make sure that when you do decide what it is that you want to do that you have all of your options available.

[Hubert Stumblin]

 

So the only thing that I can say is that you can follow one of two paths right now. You can put yourself into position to be able to decide what it is that you love and want to do or you can have it decided for you and it may not be what you want. Concentrate on school. Don't just do your homework, destroy it, make every answer that you write the absolute best that it can be. Work hard at it. Don't just memorize stuff for a test, understand it as best you can and be able to apply it. Right now your education is the most important job that you can have and it will influence the rest of your life. All the stuff that you are doing right now will translate to helping you get into a good college in any field. Without that education and those grades, your options are cut drastically.

 

 

Agreed. It never hurts to be a very smart mother{censored}er in this world.

 

And, as others here have said in one way or another, be true to yourself. That may sound like a cliche' but it's probably one of the most important things you'll ever figure out in life. Follow your way and you can't go wrong.

[Willyguitar]

This thread is the HCer's dream thread.

 

[video=youtube;Xe1a1wHxTyo]

[cratz2]

Oh and MS in PChem here as well But I don't do anything related to chemistry in my work and haven't for about 25 yrs

 

Where did you go and what DID you want to do with P Chem rather than a 'money-making' chemistry?

 

I went to Purdue and I think I was one of about 10 declared Physical Chemistry majors my year vs about 500 general chemistry, 300 chemical engineering and 300 organic chemistry majors.

 

And how's this for self abuse: one of the other Physical Chemistry majors starting the same year was as nurse going back to get a BS because she needed a BS (and had a BA and I think to MSs) for a job that she basically already had in the bank.

 

Physical Chemistry for fun basically.

[Elias Graves]

I get to do cool weird stuff like this....

 

My job found me. I was studying English in college and started working with assistive technology. That was 20 some years ago.

Helping someone find mobility again is a pretty cool way to spend your days.

 

EG

[Willyguitar]

^^ I think I need to PM you.

[Buttcrust]

I get to do cool weird stuff like this.... My job found me. I was studying English in college and started working with assistive technology. That was 20 some years ago. Helping someone find mobility again is a pretty cool way to spend your days. EG

as I am somewhat disabled and Social Security/ Medicare allowed me to get a chair for my mobility

 

so thanks

[Buttcrust]

When I started working in the industrial switch factory, right out of high school I worked in the "punch press" (progressive dies) room. Loud and oily as hell. I got to be a product inspector. I moved on to another inspection job (industrial computer components) and they paid for an associates degree in electro/mechanical engineering. That took me 5 years, nights, one course at a time. Well computers in the 80's took a dive so I went to a plastic molding shop and was a quality inspector/technician and engineer (assistant to the president of quality). That lasted about 7 years. Then I went to a valve factory that made industrial valves as an inspector (nuclear components/NASA) and ended up after 8 years as the shop supervisor. I got layed off and then made industrial ovens that flow solder on circuit boards. Then I retired (due to a disability). I never really figured out what I wanted to do. Now I want to buy a truck and be a junk metal man like Fred Sanford, start a small music studio where my and my kids friends record, build a finished studio apartment in my big old house, live there and rent 3 apartments out and die happy.

[Elias Graves]

as I am somewhat disabled and Social Security/ Medicare allowed me to get a chair for my mobility so thanks

 

The way I see it is that if you don't do something to make the world a little better, you only made it worse. All the best to you, and if you ever need info, hit me up.

 

Same for you, Willy.

 

Part of what I do also satisfies the innate gearhead in me. I get to design and build a lot of projects that are not only fun to work on but are worthwhile, too. That's one of my secret, selfish motivations. Tools all day! Woot!

 

EG

[Bitterguy]

Thanks for all the help and advice keep it coming. i reallt like all of the insightful advice and stories, i forgot how good the HC community was because i honestly forgot about it up until recently.

 

Something else that has always been a major decision for me. If I don't manage to get a scholarship (or my dad wins the lottery) then I'm planning on signing up for the military for what i want to do. This way they pay for college and I am "ahead of the game" when it comes time to goto that college. Thoughts? Opinions?

[Buttcrust]

 

Thanks for all the help and advice keep it coming. i reallt like all of the insightful advice and stories, i forgot how good the HC community was because i honestly forgot about it up until recently. Something else that has always been a major decision for me. If I don't manage to get a scholarship (or my dad wins the lottery) then I'm planning on signing up for the military for what i want to do. This way they pay for college and I am "ahead of the game" when it comes time to goto that college. Thoughts? Opinions?

 

 

can you take and give orders ?

[noisebloom]

 

Thanks for all the help and advice keep it coming. i reallt like all of the insightful advice and stories, i forgot how good the HC community was because i honestly forgot about it up until recently. Something else that has always been a major decision for me. If I don't manage to get a scholarship (or my dad wins the lottery) then I'm planning on signing up for the military for what i want to do. This way they pay for college and I am "ahead of the game" when it comes time to goto that college. Thoughts? Opinions?

 

 

You don't need a scholarship or a lottery win to go to college. Tons of people work their way through college and get by just fine. While the military isn't a bad choice, it isn't your only choice. You can go to junior college affordably and then transfer to a four-year school. That's what I did.