<p>In a post from several months ago, someone asked about colleges that provide intellectual stimulation and have students who like to learn for the sake of learning. I am going to change the question a little bit and ask what <em>jobs and careers</em> you would consider to be the most intellectual? Besides the more obvious answer of professor, what jobs and careers provide intellectual stimulation and challenge and allow you to work with other like-minded people who are interested in the world around them?</p>
<p>I think being an research scientist or an engineer, i.e. problem solvers and inventors, can be more intellectually stimulating than being a professor which could end up to be rote - i.e. a history or English professor who’s been teaching the same material for 20 years is at an intellectual null point. OTOH a professor who’s performing research and introducing it into his classes would fall into the intellectually stimulating realm.</p>
<p>The great teachers I’ve known never go on automatic pilot; it’s all about relating to the students in front of them.</p>
<p>I’m not sure architecture counts exactly, but one of the things I like about it is that you are constantly working with different types of people. Some days you are working with the builders, some days with the bureaucrats, and other days with your clients who can represent all sorts of walks of life. In addition the actual act of design can often be like doing puzzles.</p>
<p>I have been a librarian, an editor, and a writer, and all those jobs were intellectually stimulating and challenging. I worked as an editor at a university press, and the books I worked on were always challenging. I worked on every sort of subject, including graduate-level science.</p>
<p>for history, art, humanities types (science too), museum work can be incredibly stimulating and challenging.</p>
<p>While actuaries have a rep of being dull and boring people, one of my best freidns has been an actuary for forty years and sees every day as a great intellectual challenge. He loves the math, loves to solve problems, loves to deal with clients. (He’s a consulting actuary.) Maybe it’s not the field – maybe it’s the person and how he/she views his/her work.</p>
<p>There are huge numbers of research and policy-related positions in state government, some of which involve “translating” arcane research that university professors engage in down to real-world approaches to social problems. (That’s what I do.) Having been both an editor and book publisher, I can say that the intellectual challenges of these positions tend to be greater.</p>
<p>“Maybe it’s not the field – maybe it’s the person and how he/she views his/her work.” Exactly. What’s intellectually stimulating to one person can be completely boring to another. Almost any career has the potential to be intellectually stimulating and challenging (although not all jobs within a field). If you are passionate and love doing what you are doing. With a combination of passion and ambition you are more likely to keep pushing yourself in your chosen field and seek out more stimulating and challenging work rather than be content to stay in a less demanding or challenging job in the same field. And if you do push yourself in your field, you may be surprised where you end up 10 or 20 years later. Follow you passion, see where it takes you.</p>
<p>But to throw out a few more, what about trial lawyers? Or working for a think tank? Or working as an expert or consultant in your chosen field?</p>
<p>Be prepared to shift your focus every 7 years to keep learning & finding stimulation</p>
<p>I know someone who is a skilled administrator and public relations expert with a strong commitment to social justice–she has had a number of interesting jobs with non-profit, consumer advocate, or politically connected organizations–all are related to causes she believes in and she deliberately changes her job every 3-5 years to keep interested. She was a history major in college.</p>
<p>One of my favorite jobs was being a librarian in a small university library. It was a professor’s personal collection of Africana. I had to collect reading material for each lecture, file newspaper articles and help students find resources for papers. It was one of my favorite jobs - too bad librarian’s have such lousy pay.</p>
<p>bookworm: agree completely. </p>
<p>OP: being a writer is a good career for intellectual stimulation, because you can change the focus and form of your research/writing as often as you want.</p>
<p>mini–which is more challenging? Couldn’t follow, sorry.</p>
<p>Architecture is an intellectual pursuit–particularily if you continually improve your conceptual understanding and try to weave conceptual ideas into your designs.</p>
<p>I disagree about rote professors though. They might be teaching boring classes but you never know what research they do. Besides teaching Freshamn Philosophy at a state university, my uncle, a Harvard Philosophy Phd, has been working on a side-by-side translation of Dante’s Inferno and Hegel’s Phenomenology --for 30 years. He’s one the most brilliant intellects I know.</p>
<p>^^ I distinguished between professors and teachers who basically are teaching by rote, the same material over and over, and those who perform research and exercise their mind. To think that they’re all somehow in an intellectually stimulating position just because they’re a professor just isn’t accurate.</p>
<p>That’s the difference between lectures and interactive classes. If it’s interactive, it’s not rote and it’s different every time because the students are different.</p>
<p>^Exactly. I have been teaching freshman English for 20 years, but every semester, it’s a new bunch of students, and a new bunch of challenges. It’s certainly never boring!!!</p>
<p>I am a corporate and tax lawyer; while I won’t say that it’s intellectually stimulating every hour of every day, on the whole it’s a pretty intellectual line of work, and certainly most dealings among transactional lawyers are on an intellectual basis (not necessarily the case about dealing with clients – really it depends on the client).</p>
<p>My mother was both a high school and a university teacher over the course of her career. While to some extent she taught the same material from the time she was 25 to the time she was 70, she was always looking for new things to add and new ways to teach. She was certainly never bored, and always intellectually engaged.</p>
<p>My wife does what mini describes. Right now, she is a state government official, but she has also worked for local government, big foundations, and little nonprofit advocacy groups. In every job, what she has really been is a sort of ideological entrepreneur – taking research and policy ideas from the academic world and turning them into real-world programs. However, it’s very challenging for her to keep the vision amid all the nuts and bolts of government and administration. She’s very good at that, but the world isn’t necessarily full of people who can handle it, which is how “bureaucrats” get born.</p>
<p>Almost any profession can be intellectually stimulating if you strive to be among the best at what you do, choose to challenge the boundaries of the profession and thing long term and creatively.</p>
<p>I watched an interview with Jon Bon Jovi. Now I am not a fan of his music but I came away from that interview utterly impressed with his life and long term goals. The same with Jay Z. Anyone who claims they do not lead intellectually stimulating lives do not know what they have accomplished and where they see themselves in the future.</p>