Not so much a career reinvention, but I dropped out of university way back when to basically get the first job in IT that wanted me, which turned out to be software testing.
I'm not sure if any of them count as "careers," but I've done several significantly different things for short periods. My current path is a lot more permanent and long-term in nature than the others, but I'm not sure how long I'll actually end up sticking with it. Most of these changes were sort of serendipitous and didn't require a whole lot of preparation.
I went to law school at 30, after 5 years as a bureaucrat for a state water agency. Huge step, only made possible by copious amounts of self-delusion. Which, apparently not completely dissipated, contributed to the switch 20 years on from big city to small town lawyer.
Life's short, though, and you only get one, so you do have to live the one you want.
To the extant you can, of course. Or are deluded into thinking you can.
I dunno that my switch was really as big as all that. I did one thing, I got sick of it, I went back to school, that went sort of badly, I used the original thing I did to lever my way into doing a different thing that uses the skills from the original thing (some of the time). Blume's career change -- really the career change of anybody who was in academia from undergrad on and then left entirely, which I think describes at least a few other people here -- was much more dramatic.
I am bored witless and daydreaming about reinvention (note: this is still the best lawyering job I've ever had! The people are mostly nice! I approve of the clients! I'm just bored.), but mortgage, kids, what on earth would anyone else pay me to do, it seems implausible.
I can't remember where Blume ended up -- I remember academic; usual maddeningly insane job search; determination that academia wasn't going to work out; shiny new job, but I've lost what sort of thing the shiny new job is, other than not-academic.
Grad school on track to an academic job, grad-school dropout working at various unsatisfying administrative jobs for a number of years, now a new lawyer roughly the same age as the junior partners.
I've lost what sort of thing the shiny new job is, other than not-academic.
Some sort of state government policy thing, I think.
I think I've got at least one more reinvention in me. Maybe more.
Jammies has a new great-grand-boss who is younger than we are. Graduated college in 2000.
My boyfriend would love to be reinvented as a baker in a cute bakery. I want him to establish a customer base as a cottage food operator before we open a bakery.
Because I hate dreams and fun and prize-winning bagels.
I'm a failed political scientist. I think I've mentioned this before.
After ten post-college years working in the labor movement and city politics, ending up as director of communications for the city councilmember who's now the mayor, I left public service to pursue screen and television writing. Over the last six years I have been paid a total of $550 for writing, all from a friend for supplying him with extra gags for a fake news show.
I've continued to do intermittent consulting in the world that no longer employs me full-time, as well as some hybrid and ancillary gigs such as pitching concepts for PSAs.
It hasn't been unremittingly bleak -- early on, a writing partner and I were selected for a prestigious fellowship and got a manager off of that. We came close on a staffing job, a script of ours got some nice attention, but our manager never got us another interview or even a meeting, and my partner returned to academe. Meanwhile, another writing partner and I are close to signing an option for an indie feature -- no money up front, but a good shot at getting the film made.
It's been slower and harder, overall, than I expected. The hardest part has been putting together my own television material after my first partnership broke up. (Television samples are more often used to get jobs on shows than sold outright, so the fact that my old partner and I wrote some good scripts means nothing to someone who would want to hire me alone.) I actually have a good network, and I feel like once I have a couple of scripts under my own name worth showing around, I'll be able to get back in the game. But I'm far from having those scripts.
I'll turn 40 next year. It's rare for someone to get a first job in a writer's room at my age. It may be the case that I set a goal of writing a feature a year while continuing to consult, and dabbling in comedy, theater and music. That feels like failure, but less acutely so than it would have when I started (and less acutely so than before I had a kid). The consulting definitely feels like I could turn it into a going concern, and while I've enjoyed setting up a partnership with two other friends in the same world this year, I don't love the work.
Reinvention: jury out.
I'd say there's a pretty darn good chance that I'll be doing something (more or less completely) different from what I'm doing (in school for) now ten years from now. It might well be what I was doing before, or something closely related.
I've thought about moving from research to more venture or other startup-related leadership things. Because most of what I do right now is review people's data and plan budgets and suggest research proposals, so why not get paid crazy money for it?
I dallied with the idea of going back to school to pick up a Master's in Aerospace Engineering last year. I chickened out because I didn't want to go back to sharing living space with other people and make the various other sacrifices being a full time student would require. I may yet do it if I can put together enough of a buffer that I don't have to sacrifice too much.
After a few wasted years in the bookstore and restaurant world (which sounds better than "retail and food service"), I started writing for pay, which turned out to be several jobs on a vague continuum that went from sporadic freelancer to full-time freelance journalist to staff journalist and back, like the career writer's equivalent of Flowers for Algernon. Taken as a whole, though, I've basically been a typical resident of a city that prides itself on marginal quasi-creative employment, so at least I embody the Zeitgeist. I'm like, reinventing myself all the time, you know?
21: When I contemplate something like that, I get wracked with anxiety. Do you just get used to figuring it out as you go? Or is it a good fit for your temperament? Or?
22 is cheeseball but nice, but it makes me realize that I'll spend about a lifetime and a half changing diapers.
But then you'll have more lifetimes doing other stuff!
Some think they are already ghosts.
I think found my panel.
I am on my third sports lifetime. I do wonder what my fourth sports lifetime will be.
I only expect to spend a couple decades at this job, partially because I wasted a decade in grad school. I don't know what the next would be. If I won the lottery, I could run for office without dialing for dollars. I am not interested in public office enough to run if there isn't lots of magical money.
23: I suppose I've gotten used to figuring it out as I go, and it's a good fit for my psychopathology temperament, but I've definitely gone past any reasonable point of diminishing returns as far as my anxiety, or my putative career, are concerned. Time to do...something.
I now work as a programmer after having been a philosophy grad student and VAP.
22- I can't get past the f-ed up drawing of a molecule that I think is supposed to be DNA-like. Just like I started reading Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks and by page 2 was quibbling with the authors description of scale and calculations (Her cells would circle the earth 3 TIMES if laid end to end! So would anyone's, good thing they're not end to end.)
30: What makes you think they are molecules? They are just meaningless squiggles that represent the mystery of existence.
30: He's really more of a thinker than an artist. (Or a scientist.)
I've never really mastered anything: went to philosophy grad school, loved it in some ways, but realized that I would suck at it in some other important ways, and then bounced around temping for a couple of years (lack of social capital, right there). Practically fell into a plum IT job that I had for ten years, most of which I spent blogging here, and then gave that up (happily, at that point) to become a full-time dad in the middle-of-nowhere. Started dabbling in programming a few years ago, and finally submitted my first app this past week (I'll never tell). At this point, it's hard to imagine that I'll keep doing any one thing (or stay in one place) for too long.
(Her cells would circle the earth 3 TIMES if laid end to end! So would anyone's, good thing they're not end to end.)
So would anything, by the Archimedean property.
I can't reinvent myself.
I'm still hoping to be born.
I will renew my request to the assembled programmers for an iPhone app that displays updates of Unfogged threads without having to reload the whole thread. (This is less needed now, with faster wireless data and fewer comments, than in the past. But it would still be great.)
Musicians with gongs
Fertilized an egg with song
Asleep in the sphere
Her foetus was a knot of fear
She butted with her horn
Split an egg and war was born
tj remains my mortal enemy forever. I gots quotes and links:
Do not demand of politics that it restore the "rights" of the individual, as philosophy has defined them. The individual is the product of power. What is needed is to "de-individualize' by means of multiplication and displacement, diverse combinations. The group must not be the organic bond uniting hierarchized individuals, but a constant generation of de-individualization. Michel Foucault, Preface to Anti-Oedipus.
from
Unemployed Negativity reviewing Jennifer Silva's Coming Up Short: Working Class Adulthood in an Age of Uncertainty
Silva:
At its core, this emerging working-class adult self is characterized by low expectations of work, wariness toward romantic commitment widespread of social institutions, profound isolation from others, and an overriding focus on their emotions and psychic health. Rather than turn to politics to address the obstacles standing in the way of a secure adult life, the majority of the men and women I interview crafted deeply personal coming of age stories, grounding their adult identities in recovering from their painful pasts--whether addition childhood abuse, family trauma, or abandonment and forging an emancipated, transformed and adult self."
UE
Read along these lines Silva's "mood economy" offers an even more meager reward than even the consumer society. No longer is the promise one of buying things the ultimate capture of desire, compensating for a life sold away in labor, but the promise of "self-help, of organizing one's hopes and desires. In austerity there is no longer the promise of endless accumulation, but endless introspection--which comes much cheaper. An insipid spiritualism supplants a decadent materialism. It just so happens that the central watchword of this spiritualism is responsibility, the subject it produces is infinitely responsible for every lost job, for debt, for a tattered world of community and relations. The self-help subject is the perfect subject of a contemporary labor situation we demands responsibility and flexibility.In this way Silva's conception of a "mood economy" is in some sense similar to Rob Horning's "analysis of the virtual compensations of social media, the retweets, likes, and reblogs" that give us a sense of validation. In each case "economy" or "compensation" functions as a kind of consolation prize, these economies function to paper over the decline of real wages and actual connections with others. Our rewards get smaller, and with each spiral inward the idea of changing the system becomes harder and harder to imagine.
I will let you find the Rob Horning link.
This wouldn't exactly be a new career, but I've always wanted to returned to graduate school and get my doctorate in linguistics, and then teach that.
Sadly, I think the math (and the money it would take to do that) would stop me.
Also I'd like to be a forest ranger. Wouldn't that be an excellent career? I know a guy who's an ecologist for the state of Arkansas. I mean, it pays shit, apparently, but it sound like a great job. He drives around to various wilderness regions, hikes around and counts coyote and deer droppings, blows up ponds to count the # of dead fish that result, that sort of thing. It's my DREAM job.
I've always wanted to returned to graduate school and get my doctorate in linguistics, and then teach that.
What kind of linguistics?
I think I'm too cowardly to reinvent myself.
Looking back from my dotage, I decided recently that though I have re-invented myself multiple times, none of them were successful or fulfilling because the core underlying fact remained that I was never really worth a damn at doing anything, including breathing.
Let's see: temp/food service/unemployed, financial industry interspersed with writing and going back to school, non-profit bullshit... not really sure if there is anything I do all that well. I *wish* I was really good at organizing spreadsheets. The spreadsheets I try to organize always look amateurish and banal. Somehow I have wound up in a job with a boss who is totally unlike me, but shares several significant occupational deficiencies. I need to get out a.s.a.p., but of course now I've been saying that for about 20 months and am no closer. I really don't want to still be here a year and a half from now. One of my correspondents who is a bit younger than me had a terrible time post-financial crisis. She did like 10 different long-term temp jobs, or temp-to-perm or whatever, and got laid off from all of them. Now she works in a corporate mail room downtown. Which would be an okay job except the pay sucks and it would probably be hell on my back. Shit.
This is one of the more depressing OPs ever. Can we talk about racially disproportionate sentencing or something fun like that instead?
42: That's how they count fish in ponds?
22, 26: Yeah, that's not an easy panel to get away from. "Now I spend most of my time mentally simulating a reality where [my 20s] didn't happen." Ugh.
I was never really worth a damn at doing anything, including breathing.
Your modesty is sweet but excessive, bob. Your continuing existence is strong evidence that you are, at least, an ok breather.
42.last: One of my college friends is an arborist for a medium-sized capital city and college town. With lots of hipsters. Not to say slackers. She seems to have a pretty awesome life & career praxis.
50: I read this as "abortionist" and thought, Oh, cool, are we reclaiming that word?
47: Dynamite is deprecated now, IME. Current standard, doing catch-mark-and-release fishing, and deducing populations from the number of fish re-caught.
It seems appropriate that Jesus hasn't worked a day in his life.
I have had a lot of fun with my reinvention, and think I might be an OK if not speedy scientist, but my God I am no better at academic politics than at corporate politics. Slightly worse, maybe, because I care more.
I was recently made aware of the annual "San Francisco Homeless Count," which I hope uses humane methods.
Damn, the Rob Horning was just too good and bleeding-edge too resist. Paolo Virno! Lazzarato!
Thus the transformational potential of the enhanced social cooperation on which the economy increasingly depends is neutralized, frittered away in ostentatious narcissism. The self-interested acquisitiveness and insatiability that capitalism encourages remain posited as natural conditions, as inescapable human nature. Our collaborative nature is expropriated, and we ourselves regard it as weakness unless we can turn it to account and make it personally advantageous. We will come to know ourselves in the same way we breathe life into brands through what marketers call "co-creation." We will ourselves be co-created.
I wish, I hope to become fluent enough with this shit to use it with the hardcores at CT, but never been good at anything.
I think in order to reinvent you have to have had a plan, or at least a focus, to begin with. I have never planned anything at all about my working life, except wanting to work in nonprofits. Basically everything that has ever happened to me has been accidental but worked out well (lucky, I know).
I am a case study in "do a bunch of things sort of well and get hired by people who know you personally". I don't have any specific degree, or certificate, or profession. But I get paid nicely to do interesting work in a fun and stimulating environment, which leaves me feeling like I won the lottery.
I am having a hard time these days with all of the terrific people who come through on informational interviews. I wish to heaven that I had something meaningful and helpful to tell them, something that wasn't "Work really hard and maybe when the music stops you'll somehow end up with a chair."
This thread inspired me to look up the difference between career and careen.
I thought I might reinvent myself when I moved out here and applied to this and that, but that hasn't worked out so hot unless "unemployed person running out of money" counts. At this point I am very eagerly trying to get jobs in my old field.
I started out as a programmer, which is what I wanted to be when I grew up, and still is. But my career seems to have slowly evolved over time, to the point where I am currently spending most of my time writing policy papers about various IT-related topics. My job description involves something about "knowledge management", whatever the hell that is. I still write code when I can find and excuse to do so, maybe eight hours a week.
I got some nice job security, but as soon as my kid graduates college, I plan on leaving the Company to spend my days writing artisanal software in a nice cottage next to a lake.
Well, I suppose this is the right opportunity to tell you that I'm at the beginning of a reinvention. Not that the last 17 years were a false or unsatisfying step, just one that's ending.
Anyway, over the last few years I've thought a lot about what I'd like to do for the rest of my life (or the next bit of it at least) - a job where I can carry on learning stuff, be reasonably practical. preferably public sector or 'worthy' in some way, retrain without it costing a fortune, be accessible from my family home because we're not moving just yet, offer lots of choice of paths to follow, ect ect ect. And came up with nursing. The more I thought about the it, the more it appealed, and so this autumn I have sent off university applications and have a couple of interviews in January. Would be to start a 2 or 3 year course, paid for by the NHS, next September.
59: Did you see this job posting in your area, which I got at the other place from someone here and neglected to pass on to you?
I have five years until Selah goes to kindergarten, at which point I'll have been at this job more than 15. The plan has always been that I'll go back to school, though of course one can't really aim for academia these days so I don't know, something that will let me keep working in the child services field just not as a foster parent. I don't have concrete plans at all, though I get excited about things occasionally, and I'm not sure if I'm even cut out to go into counseling or credentialed activism or whatever it would be.
I was an IT person, then I tried to be an academic, and now I'm an academic-IT person.
I spent years in philosophy, and I do still regret that I didn't manage to make the final leap from adjunct [or UK equivalent thereof] to academic. The IT I do now is much more interesting than the stuff I did 20 years ago, but if I'd stayed in IT rather than taking the academic diversion, I'd certainly be earning a lot more money.
That said, I spent 4 years working before I went to university in my early 20s, so I suppose that was a reinvention in itself, of sorts.
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Has everyone already seen the geo-coded Twitter map of Beyonce-related tweets? I love seeing West Africa light up after Nigeria wakes up.
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asilon, that's great! You're in many ways an inspiration to me, and I'll be watching closely and certainly cheering you on.
During my junior year of undergrad, I got a six-month internship with [human rights organization] in South America (where I was studying abroad). I hoped the internship would lead to a full-time job after school, but I returned to the US completely disillusioned by the experience.
Then I spent my senior year moping around and playing in a band. Then one of the bandmates convinced me to stick around after graduation and play music for a year. One year turned to eight. One band led to another. Then another. That third band got tantalizingly close to a record deal, but that vanished into thin air when [mildly famous producer] decided he wanted to go focus on K-pop or something.
Now I'm in law school, because I failed to read the comments at Unfogged.
Congrats, asilon! A friend recently made the switch from law librarian to Baltimore ER nurse, and couldn't be happier.
I'm trying to make the switch into more senior management, and I suspect I need to make that jump fairly soon, or I'll get sidelined. Institutional politics in my current place make that difficult, and I'm worried I'm getting pigeon-holed as someone who can be relied on to get things done, and bridge the techie/academic roles. but that I'm more useful to the powers that be at my current level [junior management/senior techie] than I would be if I got promoted. It doesn't help that the last few senior posts that have been vacated have been replaced by more junior roles.
Stay-at-home dad living in the desert sounds pretty nice. Are those gigs tough to get?
39: I would like to be able to comment from my iPhone reliably.
69 - Well, if you ever need anyone to moan at about the university's fucked-up/nonexistent plans for sensible career development, you know where he is.
Thanks - am pretty sure I shouldn't be an inspiration to anyone, but am excited about doing something new/nervous of having the bloody interviews.
Stay-at-home dad living in the desert sounds pretty nice. Are those gigs tough to get?
Post a personal ad on the Phoenix Craigslist and find out for yourself!
I was a baker, then I became a box-stacker, t obe awake for the day, now it looks like I'm the only one in the company than has a vague idea of what a database is, I'll be a box-stacker/database programmer.
53: Oh yeah, wait, carpentry. I should give that a whirl.
Yes to the OP. I'm about to finish a second master's in the new field. I hope (things are crazy now). And then go on the job market. I'm nervous as hell about all of this.
How do you all let 33 go without comment?
33 I've never really mastered anything except the art of trolling one's own blog.
Or, you know, cultivating a very rare sort of online community.
I changed fields thanks to a master's, but I see it as focusing better on the kind of thing I always wanted to do, rather than a reinvention. I do regret not getting to work in foreign languages anymore, but that was probably unavoidable.
Like Witt, I feel inordinately lucky: I was at a full-time job within a month of getting each of my degrees. I've missed some big personal goals while doing well career-wise, although more out of inactivity than being "busy" (that perpetual excuse).
I expected to find some familiar notes being sung in this thread, and I have!
My peak as a history grad student would've been analogous to clew's "I might be an OK if not speedy scientist", if I hadn't added self-sabotage to the mix by doing more work-for-wages than was strictly necessary.
Then again, that work-for-wages was what put me in a position in Natilo's approximate field, via the process Witt outlined in 57, with an organization that pays me marginally more than what others pay my peers because we're small enough that I have partial responsibility for HTML- and CSS-related crises work (by the same logic that has LRT doing databases in 74).
54 but my God I am no better at academic politics than at corporate politics
Academic politics confuses me. About five days ago I got an email from someone that seemed to be encouraging me to apply for a job. I hadn't been planning to do more job-seeking now but thought if they went to the trouble to contact me specifically, maybe I should. So I wrote back today and got a quick reply that was a longer and more polite version of "sorry, too late now". I didn't let that much time pass. Oh well. No big deal, since I don't really want to leave this job right away.
But, also like others, I am - having failed to invent myself - aiming for a reinvention with a second Masters: I want to make a long-shot application to this program next month, and a more credible one in the fall.
For now, though, I'll spend my evening making weird cookies and sipping bourbon. Which isn't a terrible plan for the nonce, but still ...
Lastly: Although this is clearly false, I now feel as though I achieved something by citing in 79 both the post Minivet alluded to in 78 and the post essear cited in 80.
submitted my first app this past week (I'll never tell).
Look, they already beat you to the punch
...also, post-lastly, I might've known that having talked in 79 about using HTML I would fail at it in 81...
The program linked in 81 sounds like a great idea, and I'm surprised more schools don't do something like it.
Other forums commenting on that program - not at my urging, in those cases - have similarly expressed surprise that it hasn't been used as a model, or remodeled, by other institutions.
There are other engineering schools that I investigated which seem to allow under-prepared sorts like me to join, with similar conditions about catch-up courses, but they express that far more informally and apparently give less organizational support.
86 is a fantastic use of the ambiguity of "program" in these cases.
TJ, are you planning to let the Mineshaft choose what you do next?
"Never really mastered anything" is key. Not have mastered anything, and not having found anything that impels me to will one thing, I prefer being a stay-at-home dad. It's immensely gratifying and fun, I'm decent at it, and if I do fuck up, it's either a teaching moment or memoir fodder. It turns out to be considerably more difficult to be a stay-at-home parent post-marriage, but I've never really mastered having a stable income.
62: Forgive me for not already knowing, but what it is you do? I know the company you work for (because it's listed on your stats in the other place) but I'd imagine there are a lot of different departments in the company.
Sometimes I think I want to be a patent examiner. I bet those people wouldn't tell me to be more emotionally intelligent and suggest that I don't spend enough money on my wardrobe. But apparently the indignities I suffer are worth making twice what I would as an examiner. Also those jobs are in places like San Jose, CA and Alexandria, VA, so it would be more like 1/4 to 1/3 of my current salary when you account for cost of living. Damn you Utah and your cheap, beautiful houses.
I applied to be an administrative law judge, but having no experience in litigation makes this a reach. Also maybe the article I wrote about how the judges don't understand technology is a problem.
81: Interesting! I'm one year into a BS in CS that's designed for people who already have a BS. It's offered by Oregon State Univ. The biggest problem, though, is that it's a four-year program if you take it at my pace of one class per quarter. The University of Illinois has a MS program I might apply to. I'm one class away from satisfying their prerequisites.
80: No big deal, since I don't really want to leave this job right away.
There is an espresso machine somewhere or other nearby, after all.
91: I used to not talk about it online because it's close enough to uniquely identifying, but what the hell. I essentially do closed captioning but for financial industry conference calls and presentations rather than tv shows. So I dictate everything I hear with punctuation and formatting macros and can clean it up on the fly while it gets published online, but I have a teammate who then looks at what the computer thinks I said and makes sure the final transcript matches reality. I've learned a lot about a lot of things and the time-off benefits are unbeatable, but I started doing this right out of college and even if I'm one of the best in the country at it, I don't know if it's really how I want to spend the whole rest of my adult life.
It's all based on the fair disclosure laws that upset those cyberlibertarians a few threads ago, that SEC filings are public and searchable and a public company exec can't say anything to an analyst s/he wouldn't say to the general public, so the general public can listen in on a webcast and we do too and transcribe.
I was really bad about talking over people and predicting what they'd say next to begin with, but it's ridiculously awful now that it's what I do all day. Sorry, meetuppers!
Also, I'm pretty sure my latest round of worrying about what I should do with my life was prompted by essear pointing to the CT Sorting Hat thread and the realization that I've probably become a fucking Hufflepuff.
Also Also, the fake(?) wax(?) on top of a Maker's Mark bourbon truffle is edible or it would have been marked otherwise, right? I'm asking for a hungry friend.
You must have some crazy interesting knowledge about the financial industry. Do you invest based on the knowledge?
closed captioning but for financial industry conference calls and presentations
Ha! My IT job was with an investment firm, and I must have printed a million of these transcripts for a technophobic exec there. So I guess I'm familiar with your work.
In that vein, if someone wants to make a career of being a dilettante, not mastering anything, but learning a lot about a lot for a lot of money, equity analyst is a very cool job.
Was 97 posted by OPINIONATED SEC STING OPERATION?
TJ, are you planning to let the Mineshaft choose what you do next?
I have a severe deficit of imagination. Even though I don't know if I want to stick with civil serving where I am, I can't imagine doing anything else right now. I'm sort of where LizSpigot is w/r/t being well-compensated enough to take care of my peeps.
So.
Was 98 posted by OPINIONATED FDA STING OPERATION?
97: I don't do any individual investment at all because capitalism, but it's all public information and mostly it just runs together. Occasionally there's an exec who actually seems honest, which is always noticeable and shocking. And then there's Ja/mie Di/mon, whom we had to transcribe 5x one week and my sweet conservative Christian former-farmgirl teammate and pacifist godless liberal etc. I were both on the verge of joining a lynching party.
Here's what I'm good at:
Finding le mot juste
Making people laugh in meetings
Parodying various styles of popular writing
Bullying artsy types into doing better with money stuff
Quickly producing halfway decent designs for fliers etc.
Poetic-symbolic headline writing
Cruising through longish reports and identifying problems
Sensing when people are kiting checks
Training people in on stuff if they're intelligent
Accurately predicting the exact worst time to enter or leave a field
What should I do, Mineshaft?
99: Probably some of that was mine! I know at least one other person here has used it.
It's sort of a financial version of a liberal arts degree, that I know quite a bit about coronary stents and also offshore mining in Angola, but it's basically superficial and just a giant puzzle game to me. I do have a lot of loyalty to the company, since they gave me 2 months of full paid leave for Mara and for Selah and I could theoretically do that for one foster placement a year, plus there's a month of vacation time and they paid the not-allowed-to-marry tax penalty so I could cover Lee on my insurance like my coworkers cover their husbands. So it wouldn't be the worst thing in the world to take my manager's job and run the office when she retires and I'm the one in line for that, but it's hard to know if this is All There Is and so on.
(I know that it's not, since there are also bourbon truffles. But not many, and I'm trying to ration them.)
I was going through the is this All There Is a few months back. This is part of why time now pregnant. Have existential issues about what it all means? Have a baby!
I would probably like to do something in the future where I make a confusingly large amount of money. That would be a nice niche to inhabit for a while. Also, I would like to at some point really not have a boss. None of this like "oh, I don't have a boss but I am consulting and at the mercy of eight people" shit. Maybe I should start an etsy store and sell fake platinum like hovercrafts, eat both stones with one bird.
107.last I already did but she's in bed already and I think Lee would notice if I brought another one home tonight. I have the opposite crisis, which is that being a foster parent made my life interesting and let me feel worthwhile and now it's time to say goodbye to that. I'll still have the baby, inshallah.
105: I have a close friend who does that. He's brilliant at it, but we have practically opposite personalities.
Tweety is about 80% of the way to talking himself into starting a business.
In that vein, if someone wants to make a career of being a dilettante, not mastering anything, but learning a lot about a lot for a lot of money, equity analyst is a very cool job.
That's what I wanted to be when I was graduating from college. Unfortunately, I was only ever really able to convince one person on the buy-side in a position to hire me that I'd be good at it. And the sell-side people saw right through me.
And now, I have the health care policy and advocacy bug.
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Speaking of bourbon and edibility: I can't be surprised, given 81, that the weird cookies therein are weird.
I do continue to be vaguely entertained by re-imagining the concept - spice cookies which aren't really pfeffernusse, with cocoa and dark chocolate added in - as some race-relations allegory, since I found it on a South African site.
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A few years ago, I sat down and tried to figure out a way to sell out for more money. Leaving aside how far into evil I was willing to go, I failed to come up with a way that would make more money for the same effort at a reasonable amount of risk. So I probably won't try to reinvent myself.
I would probably like to do something in the future where I make a confusingly large amount of money.
What's "confusingly large" in this context? Like, intro level developer money, or "why yes I would also like to park my private jet at the blimp hangar" money?
And to the OP: I've never actually reinvented myself (I don't think giving up on the idea of going to grad school and jumping from paralegaling to tech support really counts); I keep kind of wishing I could, but then I run into a complete failure of imagination. I *have* managed to keep switching job descriptions as I go through my career, working my way into positions of greater importance if not prestige, but I'm not quite sure that counts.
Sounds like the Mineshaft needs to crowdsource some self-reinvention ideas for TJ and Josh.
116: no, like I'm constantly confused by how much money I make and can't really keep track of it well. It's not a specific number. Just unexpectedly much.
If you make unexpectedly much and it isn't through salary, don't forget to file a quarterly statement with the IRS and include payment of estimated taxes.
"It grew more while I was trying to spend it" seems like the comfy side of confusing.
Thorn, you sound like you have a great job for the long haul of making hairdresser-therapist an official (and insurance-covered) thing.
123.1: right, like, "oh, hm, I should pay attention to how much I'm spending lest... oh. I guess not? Okay!"
Yeah, I'll be okay, I'm just feeling more than usually disaffected with the industry, ironically because some of the things that have bothered me about it for a while now are getting wider attention and so I'm being reminded of them more frequently. It's kind of a revolution of rising expectations situation.
I would be helped in this quest by the fact that I'm actually sort of terrible at imagining ways to spend money. I basically want the same things I've wanted since I was 20.
125: not gonna work for the down-broing dudes with the unicorn BART ad, is what you're saying?
Same here and, unlike when I was 20, Winona Ryder is single.
At least as far as Wikipedia knows.
Btw, what does one wear when begging for pocket change from a billionaire? Through some ridiculous chain of events I apparently have to do that on Wednesday.
123: Just keep doing what I'm doing? Yeah, that's probably the most realistic version. It's just one more of those things where sometimes I wish I'd done other stuff, but I think it's more regret about a contrary-to-fact past more than yearning for a future.
127: Those guys actually pinged me about a job a few months ago. It was all I could do not to respond with a link to this.
130: Play your role. Either camel-hair sport coat complete with leather arm patches or go for professor-hobo-to-unworldly-to-care.
The guy literally makes enough money that, if he just gave us 90 minutes of his income instead of meeting with us for 90 minutes, we could hire a postdoc for three years with it.
130: ahaha! Can you reveal with billionaire, somehow? That'll help us help you.
I really just want to never have to work. I am lazy to the bone. I used to scoff at the adulations that are poured upon the accomplishments of people who were born with silver spoons in their mouths, because I thought it's really not so impressive considering the tremendous financial and social capital and other advantages they had; you could imagine lots of people with similar advantages easily doing as much or more. But then I realized that if I ever had enough money not to work I would immediately stop. So people who keep plugging away productively even though they could instead easily be sitting on a beach somewhere probably do deserve some sort of applause.
There's a topolo/gical quan/tum fie/ld theory named after him?
I am still very interested in inhabiting (? being? receiving?) the Someone-or-Other Endowed Chair in Puttering.
Someone-or-Other Endowed Chair in Puttering
The Well-Endowed Chair in Puttering.
My periodic bouts of wondering why I didn't go to medical school are getting more frequent.
138: does he make with the prizes? If so you should probably just, like, dress like a physicist, yeah? Seems like he's used to that.
I am a case study in "do a bunch of things sort of well and get hired by people who know you personally".
This was more or less my experience. I'm terrible at networking, but good at work, so I've worked for a couple of small, local, niche, low-profile companies and found the work satisfying if not anything that I would have imagined myself doing.
My fear is really about having to re-invent myself if/when this particular niche plays itself out. It should be possible to figure out the next thing, but there's nothing obvious and thinking about it makes me anxious.
On the other hand --
123.1: right, like, "oh, hm, I should pay attention to how much I'm spending lest... oh. I guess not? Okay!"
It's funny, I'm sometimes jealous when people talk about programming as a way to make silly amounts of money (and I was definitely jealous when Josh talked about taking six months off between jobs, just because he could), because my experience is a long ways from that. But, reading the sentence above I realized (not for the first time), the idea of making that sort of money doesn't actually sound appealing.
If I had a sudden windfall of money I wouldn't complain, but the idea of working at company in which there was tons of money sloshing around and in which I, personally, was making more money than I could spend -- thinking about that actually makes me feel anxious and uncomfortable.
So, yeah, I'd have to say, I'm happy with the path I've been on. We'll see what happens.
I occasionally think I might try to move over into tech, but I like the domain I'm in and there are some really interesting technology-related problems in it that I would like to work on, if I could just get into a position to work on them.
143: No, he makes with the, uh, hedge fund named after a notable period in Italian art?
Oh, interesting. Well, going by the hedge fund asshole who is in my program for tax reasons you should wear clothes that look like your normal clothes but are actually obscenely expensive.
Holy crap that dude is rich. And hey, he went to my high school! And he's pretty old!
No idea. Be yourself, and don't fuck up. You only get one chance with a [ that dude ].
Be yourself, and don't fuck up.
That's not advice so much as a kōan.
making more money than I could spend
No one on earth would ever pay me more money than I could spend, but making more money than I would just happen to spend seems good to me -- the "oh, should I worry? nope! still absolutely just fine" state of affairs sounds just swell.
I'm not actually speaking. Three other people are, and judging by the sheer number of slides they put together I think they're going to fuck it up. I'm not entirely clear on what my role is, except probably since I'm the youngest person involved, they're planning to dump all the actual work on me if they get what they want.
The one time I interacted with a billionaire I was pretty wasted, what do you want from me?
If I was meeting with the billionaire in question all my thoughts would be about how to get him to put money into politics, towards the branch of the Democratic Party that isn't idealistically creating grand sweeping schemes to privatize public schools, or something like that. Then I would think "Actually I'll probably fuck this up" and decide to actually pose as a particularly obnoxious spokesman for the thing I DON'T believe in. But then I'd get found out, like that Google bus guy. So what to do?
My periodic bouts of wondering why I didn't go to medical school are getting more frequent.
Barely 50% of doctors say they're satisfied with their jobs. And the satisfied 50% are like the guy* we had to dinner a while back who said, "I love gout. It's a moneymaker." If that sounds like something you'd say, maybe med school is for you.
(Nice guy and all, but this is how he thought about his work.)
I worry that I am about to have reinvention thrust upon me. I went to grad school, got the phd, made tenure, am chair of the department, and it's 50/50 if my college goes down the tubes in the next 5 years. I can try to get another job, but the job market is crap as everybody knows. I keep thinking I should either try to get into nursing or just suck it up and get an alternative licensure to teach high school ( for which the job market also sucks and I will probably have to hide my PhD). Or I could stick my fingers in my ears and do nothing, hoping it all turns out ok somehow.
I think being a lactation consultant would be super cool. You're helping women in a time of need and it would be pretty happy. I know I loved my lactation consultants and was super grateful to them. I think you need the rn, though, and then some crazy number of clinical hours
The only person my wife ever wanted to murder, except lawyers and me, was a lactation consultant.
Did 157 mean to have an easily googleable email attached? I mean, whatever, tenure, but still?
Also you need to be ok with seeing a crazy amount of boobs per day, which I am.
At College, we are dedicated to Capital Letters, When Appropriate, And When Not.
Yeah, you're supposed to make your identity obvious gradually by going slightly over the posting-personal-details line too many times, not just by giving your name right there. Takes all the fun out of it.
Not that Sifu googled it. It just, you know, looked googleable.
"I love gout. It's a moneymaker."
Obamacare will probably replace him with a robot that says, "Have some allopurinol and call me when the working class has captured the means of production."
seeing a crazy amount of boobs per day
What's the over/under here?
And my new plan to become the new Carl Zimmer by writing a science history blog may have been poorly thought out, as it seems like all the science blog networks one might potentially join are obsessed with competing to cover the new and exciting spurious results. But I have 70 twitter followers!
I might be applying for a Boston area job soon. I'd like to move back to the west coast, but somewhere on a direct flight route would be an improvement over here.
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OMG I love Kim Deal so much! I want a Kim Deal of my very own! She can sleep in the attic bedroom and I can make a practice room for her in the basement!
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I was a typical English major as an undergrad, focused about evenly on Shakespeare and fiction; after graduation I joined the marketing department of a theatre. Then I read one of Annie Dillard's essays, in which she rails at young writers to find something else -- anything else -- that satisfies them, if they can. Writing "will go through your life like a broadax," as she put it. "Huh," I thought, "doesn't tempt me." So I took myself overseas and blundered around odd jobs until I found myself an apprenticeship in historic preservation. Now I climb around the outsides of old buildings with a lot of tools hung all over me, and bring samples back to test and peer at through my microscope. And I have a nine-year old child, who looks oddly like Annie Dillard. A fairly good reinvention.
We're not allowed to interact directly with the billionaires. When our billionaire came to visit, they had the facilities guy use the firefighter's key to take over manual control of the elevators so he wouldn't interact with the hoi polloi, except facilities guy messed up and stopped at the floor where I had pushed the down button and awkwardly had to signal to me not to get on the elevator with the billionaire. The door closed, I waited an appropriate number of seconds, pushed down again, and the door opened again with billionaire still there. So I took the stairs.
169: additional context welcome. (I learned recently that Kelley Deal was a programmer in the 80s, speaking of reinventions.)
She can sleep in the attic bedroom and I can make a practice room for her in the basement!
There were rumors rob was into bass players. There were rumors... it was like, so hush-hush.
I just got back from seeing the Breeders, on tour for the 20th anniversary of Last Splash, playing with the lineup that was on Last Splash. The did the full album in order--they even switched Josephine Wiggs onto drums for the song where she played the drums on the record. Then they did a bunch of stuff from Pod and a new song.
the guy* we had to dinner a while back who said, "I love gout. It's a moneymaker."
Please tell me you served him only organ meats.
That sounds great. I, by contrast, have spent my evening fielding increasingly irate e-mails from a member of the faculty ostensibly angry about some administrative decisions I've made, but, it turns out, actually incredibly bitter because he didn't get the (reasonably shitty) post I now have. I've been very polite throughout the exchange*, but having learned this latest piece of information, I really want to write back and say, "Look, asshole, I'm sorry you didn't get the job. But that doesn't give you the right to be a dick to me about nothing." That would be counterproductive, though, so I won't do it.
* Because I assumed that I was somehow at fault.
Speaking of reinventing oneself, it turns out that I'm not cut out for administration. But I already knew that, so I'm not sure returning to the faculty full time will count as a re-reinvention.
By now I don't think I could interact with people well enough for any "job" other than the one I have. I am sorry about that. I miss people. But I have never found office life productive.
Classics grad school dropout to computer science grad school maybe-dropout (still working on my thesis, but kind of sick of it and currently employed full-time) to algorithms developer. I'm not sure I'll stay in this iteration either. My Classics past called me up recently and suggested I come back, and I'm thinking of taking them up on it if only for the change in scenery.
Several semi-intentional reinventions which in retrospect look more like sliding down the slippery slope to corporate IT. Math/light programming in support of oil exploration geophysics first. and then exploratory data analysis tools for manufacturing data via way of "AI", and then right into Mordac Denier of IT Services at age 40. In that arena I advanced pretty well in the 90s by actually working very hard for a number of years and being stupidly fearless. Did serve to put a chill on any further reinventions due to cash flow jones plus personal laziness plus corporate inflexibility. So I will probably run out the string in that general capacity.
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Speaking of "running out the string", it turns out I'm in the motherfucking hospital*!
Me: "My bad knee acting up in a particularly obnoxious way making my whole fucking lower leg hurt. Oh, and I have a lingering chest cold, too."
Medical Test-Mongering Death Merchants of Allopathy: "DVT w/blood clot behind knee and relatively mild pulmonary embolism." Fuck that shit (but I'm humoring them for now...)
I blame the patriarchy.
*The kind of hospital where they wake you at 4:45 AM in search of ten(10) vials of blood. And I'm a very hard "stick."
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University dropout > Bookseller (classics) > Programmer (applications monkey back in the day when large organisations wrote their own business solutions).
From being a reasonably senior bookseller with a lot of responsibility to a completely unqualified trainee coder on the strength of a 10 week conversion course, I increased my take home by more than 50%. Such are the values of capitalism.
Asilon, congratulations! Remember that Jeremy Hunt will hate you personally and wear it as a badge of honour.
I've managed to sustain two separate careers in parallel rather than in series, which is working fairly well for me so far, although it's a bit dissociated personality disorderish. By day I am a mild-mannered writer*; by night, a costumed** superhero.
*not really. I can get pretty annoyed.
** It includes pieces of flair.
Also: asilon, hurry up and get qualified, it sounds like JP needs help.
LizSpigot: are you a programmer by profession? If so, you don't need to put up with no bullshit at work -- jobs are plentiful right now, including remote jobs. Mozilla, for instance, hires remotes, or check out https://weworkremotely.com/ and http://authenticjobs.com/
As for me, not really reinvention but a progression in a pleasing direction that is partly luck and partly by plan. Working for myself is turning out ok. I'm writing this at home with a kitten on my lap, and I enough money to pay the bills and save some. There are annoyances and uncertainties but all up it is pretty good.
182: Best wishes on a speedy de-clotting.
186: Well, that's the plan. My contribution to the Gripe thread was "my leg hurts" which turned out to be this. But In retrospect I think the very first symptoms date from not long after the Pgh meetup (Monday after Thanksgiving, right?). Conclusions left as an exercise for the reader.
It's interestingly infantilizing. (Perhaps because this is the first I've stayed overnight as a patient since I had my tonsils out as a 5-yr old.) But I had jello, you jaded urban aesthetes.
190: you caught limp! What's the chaim of limp from Pgh meetup attendees to wafer?
by night, a costumed** superhero.
Ajay is Kick-Ass.
Nasty. Have you been flying? Get well soon!
I'd be more than happy to practise on JP in an amateur fashion ... bed bath Mr Stormcrow? Hope you get sorted out soon.
I take a baby aspirin every morning, so I think that means I can't get a blood clot ever.
190: I blame JRoth and your faith in his drink selections. We're just lucky he wasn't able to lure the entire DecadeCon there to poison us all.
I'd be more than happy to practise on JP in an amateur fashion ... bed bath Mr Stormcrow?
US readers may have not been aware until now that "Carry On Doctor" was actually a fly on the wall documentary about the NHS.
W.breeze (188), LizSpigot is a patent lawyer.
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Fuck a bunch of getting a stupid cold. So minor, and yet, I feel so run down.
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I wanted to be a dilettante in my early 20's as an then I got interested in comparative law, because I loved foreign languages.
Then I found out that despite having done okay for a while and having a certain amount of privilege, life was going to come at me with a baseball bat, knock me over silly and take the wind out of me.
Then I thought I was stupid when, really, even though I'm not brilliant, that was more about emotional issues. Then I thought I should go into fundraising, because I'm good at remembering the details of people's lives, but it was never what I really wanted.
Now, I'd actually like to master something and own a nice house/condo and have a housekeeper. I have fantasies of being a professor with consulting gigs, like Jona/thin Gr/u/ber.
What's your blog, Ned? I'll read it.
And I'm a very hard "stick."
If there is one thing—just one—for which I'm grateful in this life, it's that I have good veins.
In my current job, I get to bring the kiddo back home tonight, so almost one week to the hour since things went wrong. I'm very optimistic that we'll have a good evening and a good Christmas, but boy would it be nice to actually get better communication from the stupid hospital.
Good veins, presumably, leading to a very hard stick.
203: Yeah, I've had 8 holes poked in me by 5 or 6 different people--one guided by ultrasound which was kind of interesting to watch. 3 of the 8 were dry holes.
But as is usually the case, the nurses are all wonderful people. No bed baths yet, however.
3 of the 8 were dry holes.
Maybe they should try fracking.
Good veins, presumably, leading to a very hard stick.
I think for that you need good arteries.
Which all reminds me that today is the day I become eligible to donate blood again. No time to donate until Saturday, though.
I'm not allowed to donate blood because of Mad Cow Disease.
I don't know if I qualify. People in any of my past fields would say that I've switched to something completely different, but they're all kinda sorta related. I tried to do pure math research, wasn't very good at it, and got into optics, which somehow resulted in a CPU design job that caused periodic unfogged commenting (~50 microHertz). Now I do some weirdo specialized supercomputer stuff.
I can tell I'm less bored now because I don't read the comment sections of blogs anymore.
Phlebotomists often disregard my warning that my right arm, despite looking like the better candidate for needles (because the blood vessels are more visible/defined*), has historically given trouble to those trying to collect my blood. Then we get to sit through four or five attempts to strike the vessel, which rolls away coyly. Then the phlebotomist relents and goes for ol' lefty, which is as reliable as ever.
*Due to drumming, you reprobates.
I had a post-op infection a few years back, and ended up in hospital on vancomycin. That lovely stuff is caustic and basically eats your veins, and causes thrombophlebitis. So I had to be stuck every couple of hours, 24 hours a day, with a new canula so someone could attach a pump to it. After about day 2, I was basically refusing to get stuck by the nurses or junior doctors I knew were crap at it, as six or seven tries into veins that were already painful was getting to be a bit much.
'Dude, get the Filipino dude who did it this morning. _You_ can't do this for shit.'
For years I knew that I had an arm that was preferred by the phlebotomists, but I couldn't remember which one it was.
(It's the left for me as well.)
I tried to do pure math research, wasn't very good at it, and got into optics, which somehow resulted in a CPU design job that caused periodic unfogged commenting (~50 microHertz).
You programmed the ToS?!
If only I could reinvent today as a day when I planned to take a train instead of a plane. Sitting in a plane in Boston waiting for hours to leave thanks to snow in Newark. And now it's snowing a little bit here too. At least they just upgraded me.
188: I'm getting a CS degree because one time a client asked what my background was and was disappointed that it's chemistry and not CS. Now my boss brings it up in every other conversation because he's awesome. I have considered switching to programming, but I'm not sure if I have the right skills for it. Java is a horrible no good language. C is much better.
The veins in my arms are invisible. I have to have blood drawn from my hands using butterfly needles, and even then they tend to roll away. Irritating to say the least.
Another hour and forty-five minutes added to the delay. Whee.
Can you score free drinks? I think I speak for all of us when I say that the delay could be made really worthwhile if you got loaded and kept commenting.
218. His email is available, his password is passw0rd. Most programming jobs will put you in contact with clients of the type you unfortunately already understand.
Java is a horrible no good language.
Totally agree!
C is much better.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sqgW-2orQQg
223: I can't handle the object oriented nature of Java. This is why I prefer C. But these are the only languages I've programmed in so far. I'm sure once I get to Python I'll be extolling its virtues.
224: Ah. Yeah, you'll like Python or Ruby (or probably even Javascript) better than either Java or C. Object-orientation when you want it, not as a hard-and-fast requirement of the language.
According to William Cook, while it is possible to write object-oriented code in Java, you have to try to do so, and the language doesn't make it particularly easy. Of course, as Guy Steele observed, it's hard to write truly object-oriented code (at least, in Cook's sense) in a language that doesn't do tail-call elimination.
I read the first few paragraphs of the wikipedia page on Object-Oriented programming and don't see what the big deal is.
Delay suddenly shortened. No drunk live blogging, I'm afraid.
230: Just none from you! Somebody call in a bomb threat at Tweety's house and see what we can get from him.
I could go get drunk now. Some of the eggnog I made for the lab holiday party is still in the fridge here.
Blume just got sent home from work early because snow day (because lucky) so maybe I should talk her into getting drunk and liveblogging something or other.
Huh. So I should maybe learn to program?
229: Those are even longer than the wikipedia article.
So I should maybe learn to program?
You should make apps! I did my first app myself, but I wonder if it would have been smarter to just pay a developer. I guess the wisdom of that will be determined by whether this app makes even a penny. But you could declare yourself owner of Jesus Works LLC, hire a guy for part of the gross, and tell him to get cracking.
Making apps is the freelance photography of SAHDs.
Both 235 and 237 strike me as good signs that we're nearing the end of some kind of an unsustainable boom, but I say that as a guy who bought a house in 2006 and has timed zero of the last whatever booms.
We should all become petroleum engineers.
Making apps is the freelance photography of SAHDs.
Right. My friend in L.A. says "Apps are the new screenplays." Same idea.
I probably haven't reinvented myself (see below), but my dad has. Since college he's been, in order, a high school teacher, a lawyer, a bureaucrat, a salesman, a high school principal, and he's about to retire as a superintendent. And some other stuff. Admittedly, teaching and principalling are the same "industry," as are law and bureaucracy, but still, there's at least one big shift there.
How big a change qualifies as a reinvention? My title at my old job was "reporter." My current title, "technical writer," includes the word "writer." So in a sense, they're similar. However, I moved 480 miles from a rural area to a city, and there are big differences in salary, how much I travel, how much I deal with people, what my routine is, what I produce, and what kind of business I work for. Is that a reinvention or not? (Personally, I think the move is a bigger reinvention than the job itself.)
There are lots of jobs I'd daydream about, but given my qualifications, my marriage and my mortgage, there are very few that would be any better than this one.
hire a guy for part of the gross
A nice Argentinean guy...that's the ticket!
239 makes sense. Something counter-cyclical may be in order. This is the time for me to launch a career as a free lance writer.
I moved 480 miles from a rural area to a city, and there are big differences in salary, how much I travel, how much I deal with people, what my routine is, what I produce, and what kind of business I work for. Is that a reinvention or not?
I think that definitely counts, yeah.
243: Typewriter repairman or encyclopedia salesman would be just as lucrative.
"Apps are the new screenplays."
And freelance photography is the new real estate license.
It's flexible work-family balance all the way down.
What's the chaim of limp from Pgh meetup attendees to wafer?
Uh oh, I think I'm the link. Wafer was in Austin not so long ago.
247: So basically I should just stay put as a stay-at-home dad and maybe beef up my hunt/gather skill set?
I haven't finished the entire thread, but it's sort of reassuring to see how many people here left academia and are now getting along just fine. After leaving ABD in one country with my only real job experience in academia, I'm now working at a cook shop in another. I sometimes find myself getting very uppity with rude/disrespectful customers who have obviously decided I'm an idiot because I work in retail, which I realise is my pride having a hard time with my lack of a profession at a moment. For various reasons (waiting for permanent leave to remain and now the possibility of starting a family) I haven't really gone out there and figured out what else I could be doing, so I'm happy to see asilon as an example! This has all been a massive change, but I've found myself happy albeit wondering where I'll go next.
I already missed two opportunities to do that, but they were crappy girlfriends. Also, not doctors at the time.
they were crappy girlfriends
Oh, do you have feelings? Enjoy penury, hippie.
I prefer to call it "genteel poverty".
I really admire a guy who was my neighbor in the middle of nowhere. He's a genuine mountain man who lived in a cabin without electricity or running water by himself for several years, hunts elk with a bow and arrow, made money by leading wilderness trips for troubled teens, etc. Nice guy, married a nurse practitioner where we lived, moved in with her, and basically said, what is there for me to do here? A not very good local school offered a nursing degree, so he just buckled down and got one (while also being primary caregiver to their baby). By the time they moved away, he had his degree, and now he has a good job as an intensive care nurse.
And freelance photography is the new real estate license.
Wait, wasn't freelance photography always the new freelance photography?
258: Neighbor please. He just cribbed that story from Gilgamesh.
"Apps are the new screenplays."
No kidding. My app is about one third finished. When its done, it could make me hundreds of dollars a day. Maybe.
But I'll have to finish it first, which is looking less and less likely, as I am frequently distracted by other shiny things.
Gilgamesh the Nurse. One of history's great epics.
Here, Klugman and Waltguy. Tell all your friends.
Wait, wasn't freelance photography always the new freelance photography?
Nope. It became way more affordable and thus appealing to SAHMs.
262: Gilgamesh's pal Enkidu. Presumably Shamhat can back me up on this if she's still around.
Wafer was in Austin not so long ago.
That fucker.
Nice guy, married a nurse practitioner where we lived, moved in with her, and basically said, what is there for me to do here?
I did that with Blume, except instead of "nursing" it was "not terribly practical doctoral program".
267: Right. There's only place you know you don't have to look when doing a Where's Wafer? book.
Wafer was in Austin not so long ago.
Wait, what? I think I'm offended.
Wait, what? I think I'm offended.
Now it is getting interesting.
So is Sir Kraab a limp carrier?
If I get nothing else out of this ridiculous mini-trip to beg for money, at least finally got me to overcome my laziness and get a long-overdue haircut.
Well, you might still get the money too.
Maybe I'll also find the missing "it" from 272.
First you get the money. Then you get the haircut. Then you get the women tenure.
275 sounds overly optimistic in this case.
Nope. It became way more affordable and thus appealing to SAHMs.
My BF's sister-in-law has basically become a SAHM who does photography. She got a PhD in either biochem or biology. (She never would say what her research was only that it was complicated and I wouldn't understand.) She got some $35K tax-free scholarship intended to keep Canada's best and brightest at Canadian universities, but she was never all that interested in it and just thought she'd get a $100k gov't job, but the gov't stopped hiring.
So, she does wedding, engagement and baby photos.
Did we talk about this yet?
http://www.businessinsider.com/inside-the-justice-system-2013-12
Teensy bit disingenuous, but still kind of amazing.
182: Get well soon, JP.
In other news, I've been feeling a bit lost while trying to handle some new responsibilities at work. Said responsibilities involve a certain amount of politicking around with important people in my field, which is hard for me because I took an unusual path into this field, and have always felt like a bit of an outsider, professionally speaking. Also, my personality is the opposite of outgoing and confident. Sometimes I think I should just give up and let someone else do the politics... but on the other hand, I'd really like to become a bit more politically savvy and better-connected in my field, and anyway I'm a masochist.
This is so not the thread for me. I'm doing something along the lines of what I thought I would be doing since age ten or so, and have for pretty much my entire working life. And I have great veins for drawing blood.
263: Thanks! Bookmarked, so don't let me down.
270: you knew I was there. You were invited to come out for (very good) beer. You couldn't because of some lame-ass excuse. Still, be offended. I can't blame you.
Not to hijack too much, but this is an authentic coincidence. Am I write in thinking that one of our eminent overlords here played a major role in creating this resource? If so, thanks, that entry was the most helpful definition I've seen.
re: 264
Yeah. What Heebie said.
Commercial photography used to be technically really quite difficult, and the learning curve quite steep. So you had to get the shot. Now, with instant review and easier kit, not so much. It still takes skill to take interesting pictures but the financial and technical hurdles are substantially lower.
Late to the party but congrats, Asilon - very exciting. Several nurses in my family, most of whom like their jobs.