Broken Wing

Choosing a career is difficult

Choosing a career can be very difficult. If you think you have to choose when you're in high school, then you're making a decision that will affect (at least) the next 4 years of your life. I don't know about you, but if old photographs are any indication, at 18 I wasn't qualified to pick out my own clothing. Then you have to take into account mental maturity. I've been outside my mother's vagina for about 10 years longer than your average 8th grader, yet odds are we're at the same stage in mustache development. Might mental development and maturity be as variable as facial hair onset? If so, we're wrong to pigeonhole people into careers too early into their lives. This may be the root cause of my selection of "Superhero" as my career choice in my senior survey.

Another dimension in this issue is career change. Many people now are switching careers after working for years in fields in which they earned degrees. My mother, for instance, switched careers from what I seem to remember as middle management to education, teaching ESL. What if, in, say 30 years, I'm sick of my work as professor in a computer science department, doing research on sexy robots? Could I switch careers to robot porn film director (whether all those jobs have been taken by robots is an issue for another post altogether)? It's not quite the same. See, to switch to a teacher, as my mother did, you just have to be willing to work for almost nothing. There's not as much demand for those jobs, since you could technically make as much by professionally pan-handling. Sure, teachers get better health insurance, but pan-handlers don't have to pay income taxes. Posted by mill1991 at July 13, 2005 10:18 PM | TrackBack