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?
As an engineer who is well off with a wife and a dog and a house, it was pretty much:
- Work hard in high school
- Hard enough to get a full ride to my state’s major public university
- Choose an engineering degree that seems interesting enough
- Turned out to be a great choice, motivated me to work hard enough to get a 4.0 through college
- Had a few internships throughout college at various {industry} companies
- Eventually managed to get hired out of college at the most prestigious {industry} company, working with people with much fancier colleges’ degrees, PhDs, MBAs, the like
- Now I’ve been working there for {n} years, have taken multiple roles, have had field assignments, and I’m still loving it and learning every day / week
- My wife (who I met in my degree program) has also had a great and fulfilling career as we’ve moved together around the country
The best thing about engineering, as proved out by both my wife and myself, is that you can get just about any job even tangentially related to your degree so long as you have the right work ethic, strong enough people skills, and you can pick up whatever skills you need on the job.
If we ever got bored or didn’t like the company (which has happened to my wife twice now), you can just switch companies or in my case switch roles in the (multinational) company and be doing something entirely new until you find what really clicks, be that company or role or both.
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.
I’m underqualified for this thread but I have to say, these perspectives are amazing.
If you exist you are not underqualified! I want to hear everyone’s version of the human experience and making things work in our societies.
If you aren’t satisfied with where you’re at, it may put things in perspectivefor other readers just as much as the earlier portions of someone else’s story who is pleased with their career progress.
I recently heard an idea that “success is a lagging indicator”. You cannot know that you are not currently on a path to success.
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.
https://www.stonisi.gr/post/7411/eftasan-kai-oi-germanoi-neonazi-pics
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.
Like most here I work in IT. Unlike most here I have a BS in earth sciences (meteorology). While in school I did some summer volunteer work for the NWS near my home outside of DC that I found through an Alum that worked there. After I finished school that turned into a full time federal contractor position doing instrumentation testing and design. The facility was smaller and so I split my time with my friend (the alum that helped me in the first place) doing IT work. A few years down the road and I got a masters in information security (because sometimes a piece of paper matters). I turned that into a full time IT position at the same facility (still as a contractor).
For personal reasons I later moved out of state which was pretty difficult to find a job, most places assume you want relocation assistance or otherwise aren’t interested in out of state applicants. I used an employment agency to help, and got a good job as a jack of all trades IT admin at a small engineering company (about 200 employees total). I stayed there for a few years before moving to a large enterprise. I wanted to go somewhere with growth potential. I liked that job and made a lot of great friends and professional contacts. I ended up leaving for a verity of reasons (bad management, poor company outlook, and seeking more stability).
I eventually found my current job through someone I was working with who moved to my current company. I work for a national laboratory doing IT security work making good money in a super stable career (I’m a contractor so protected from a lot of the politics but the lab does work for the DOD so funding is never really in question).
My general tips would be:
- Get to know alum at your school (if you choose to go to school)
- Don’t be afraid to work outside your major
- Start broad then generalize. I work with tons of folks that specialized in their field from the start, and while they are super smart at the one thing, they are locked into it and often can’t see the forest through the trees. Having a broad base makes it way easier to ask questions that help move projects forward.
- Ask dumb questions. Chances are if you don’t understand it, others don’t either. Don’t be afraid to look ignorant, every good manager I’ve ever worked for has rewarded curiosity and questioning as long as it’s productive generally.
- Know when to cut your losses and look elsewhere. This may be the millennial in me, but you don’t owe your company anything. Know when you’re unhappy and talk with management to see if there’s a solution. If not (or if management is the problem) look to move somewhere else.
- Goes with the above but the best time to find a job (and usually a promotion with it) is when you have a job.
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.
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.
Fast food, waiting tables, short cook, metal fab, school jobs, temp jobs, procurement, procurement analyst, business analyst, designated smart guy.
Most of the jobs were appropriate for the time in my life. Seek people you like working with and a boss who cares.
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
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.
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.
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.
Airline pilot.
Sucked at school. Lousy student. Poor grades. But loved planes.
Sucked all the way through high school, even though I took an aviation intro course available at the school. Still loved planes, but liked mechanical stuff too.
Directionless at community college. Couldn’t find anything to hold my interest. Wasted a year.
Worked some odd jobs, picked up a steady, boring job that paid shit. Knew this wasn’t going to work long-term. Knew I liked working with my hands, so went to a vo-tech and aced it. Loved mechanical stuff, made the best GPA I’ve ever had. Honor roll, etc., got certifications for mechanical stuff, etc.
Decided to take a shot at flight school as a Hail Mary, and got accepted at a good college program (degrees were required at the time to get an airline job, not anymore today). Got all my ratings including instructor ratings and an aviation degree. The aviation degree was stupid because as soon as I got my first job the degree was useless, you’ve got nothing to fall back on like if you’d have gotten a business degree or an IT focused degree.
Took a few years of being an instructor pilot to get enough experience to land an ok regional pilot gig, and almost 20 years total to get a “real” airline job thanks to 9-11 and other economic downturns.
Basically poverty wages for my first 18 years of aviation career. Food stamp poverty level for over a decade.
Lessons learned: just because you’re a shitty student doesn’t mean you can’t find success. It won’t be a straight line for lots of us.
Grades do matter. If I hadn’t done well in the vo-tech program I wouldn’t have been accepted in the good school.
Spread out your options. Get a major in digital art? Get a solid minor in business admin. You can be a manager anywhere, and having the business degree will help you not get screwed by people trying to underbid your work or leech off you for your “exposure.”
If you have shot at success (whatever that is to you), sometimes it takes a really long time. I thought about leaving the job field many times. It sucked many different ways. Out of all the 29 people I started my “class” with at my first small regional job there were only 5 of us left after 15 years. People quit, left the field, had families, tried other aviation jobs. Some succeeded. Some didn’t.
Today’s aviation is different that it was when I started. I think things are slowing down, but the low pay I started with ($1k/mo as an instructor, $12/hr as a turboprop pilot (note - you got paid by the flight hour, 60-80 hours a month)) has been reversed and people get paid more as a new hire than I did after flying 15 years. The industry you work for today will change a lot over time, FBFW.
I’m still reeling from the decades of shit pay. Looking from the outside I should be pretty well off, but I’m cramming money into retirement accounts as fast as I can because this job has a mandatory retirement age, so I have to make up for all the money I didn’t have available to put into retirement and the fact that I’ll be out of a job sooner than I think. IOW, far less discretionary money. (Another lesson, save your money in a good retirement account ASAP.) I’d be a cash millionaire and then some if I’d had the money to save over the last couple decades. So we live in an older home in a cheaper area with decade+ old cars that are near or past the 6-figure milage mark. Not the more Upper-middle class life you’d expect from someone in a major airline making decent money.
Best part? I get to fly planes all over the country and now a larger part of the world. Worst part? Took a long time and being poor to get here.
My entire career has basically been an accident. I majored in history thinking I’d be a teacher because it was my favorite subject and I was 18 and didn’t know what else I could do with my life. Three years in, I realized I didn’t want to be a teacher and most history-adjacent jobs didn’t pay a living wage, so I dropped out. A bit later, I started a temp job working for the state because I needed a job and had call center experience, did a good job and managed to get hired full time. Almost 20 years later, I’m doing work I never expected to be doing but it turns out that I like paperwork and I’m pretty good at navigating bureaucracy and explaining it to laymen. Can’t imagine working in the private sector at this point. I eventually finished my degree (in human services this time) but tbh it was mostly just so I’d have one for my resume.
The biggest lesson from all of it for me has been that kids really don’t need to go to college right out of high school, or at all in some cases, and I’m glad the tide is turning on that to some extent. I’ve enjoyed pretty much everything I’ve done in my career and I’ve benefited enormously by not having a “dream job” in mind. Education is great, don’t get me wrong, but so is flexibility and a willingness to learn new things outside of school.
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.
