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<p>Many surgeons and other doctors are unhappy in their work, too. Unless you work for a non-profit (or perhaps do cosmetic surgery for the very wealthy), you’ll have to deal with insurance companies who pay you $3000 when you charged $10,000, people you have to turn away because they can’t pay, etc. </p>
<p>If you aren’t otherwise too busy this week, you might ponder the amount of truth that is really in your statement. If you thought that providing quality day care was the most moral, rewarding thing you could think of to do in your life, could you live on $8 an hour? Could you live on a teacher’s salary if the work was stimulating? And will you marry someone who agrees with these life choices? </p>
<p>Most of us are just trying to come up with some sort of reasonable compromise between money and happiness in our work.</p>
<p>Toxic,
Many, many adults are in jobs that they hate but they do them because they need someplace to live, food to eat, and have families to take care of. </p>
<p>You say that now you’re sure you want to be a surgeon. Every job has drawbacks. You’re in high school. College, medical school, and residency are a long, and very difficult road. Don’t be so sure you would love it. It is unlikely that you have any idea of what it’s like to be a surgeon. On the TV show Boston Med (documentary, not drama) one of the OB GYN residents said something to the effect of “If you don’t think about quitting or committing suicide fairly regularly, you’re probably not showing up.” </p>
<p>You will go through difficult periods in school, and in jobs. You may hate it. It may not be fun. Somehow, you just have to push through. In your case you only have about a week left. You can do anything for a week. Keep reminding yourself of that. Pre med, medical school, and residency are going to be a lot harder than what you’re doing now.</p>
<p>Thanks, I just thought you had to be happy in your career. I know not everyday, but most of the time. I just felt unhappy, because all the people I worked with loved their job. And said many times a happy person performs well at work. There’s no doubt I’m happy to have a job, it hard to find a job my at age. The reason I have the job, is because of curiosity. A spokesperson from a program came to my school and handed out info on a program that helps kids get internships. A majority didn’t care and only 5 people from my school applied. That connection may be out of luck. I took your guys advice and thought of the big picture. I do volunteer. I was just fooled by the happy people over here, and wondered why I wasn’t happy.</p>
<p>Even people who love their jobs aren’t happy every day on their jobs. There always will be things they have to do but don’t enjoy, and there will be days with lots of problems.</p>
<p>It is a good idea, however, for anyone working a job to act on the job like they love their job. People who seem unhappy are first in line for layoffs.</p>
<p>You can often love what you do, but not under the circumstances that you have to do it. You can love the people you work with but your job can be mundane. You can have a career that you feel good about and enjoy and one aspect, perhaps your major client, changes, and the entire game changes. You are doing the same job but it can now feel overwhelming. You make changes throughout your career when you can. Sometimes you sacrifice time with your family for money. There is a happy medium.</p>
<p>You would like to have a career that you can either enjoy your job, the people, the client…all, maybe one, sometimes none. Ultimately you will be healthier and happier if you find your true worth outside of your job description. What kind of a father or husband are you? What do you do for your family? What do you do in your community? That is who you are, the things that define you. A job is a paycheck that will come and go. That is a hard reality for a young person whose entire life right now is spent on studying for a good career. That’s necessary, however a means to an end.</p>
<p>Sounds like you learned more than you expected from your summer. Perhaps motivation to study harder so you have more options for the future. You got lucky- you have money from summer vacation. Jobs we hated have motivated many of us when we were sick of studying in college. Remember this experience when you wonder why you are stuck taking xyz to be the professional you intend to be.</p>
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<p>The hospital dishroom…back when patients smoked in their rooms and extinquished their cigarettes in their bowls of oatmeal.</p>
<p>You are very young and testing your values.
This is a good opportunity to remember to consider all the pieces of something before you make a decision.
I bet you had several different ideas about how to spend your summer- but for some reason you took this one. There must have been reasons- * Were you blinded by the money*? Why? Or are there other reasons?</p>
<p>We all make decisions that we change our mind about or second guess later.
Many first jobs, no matter how great they sound on paper or how much training and education you have already had- suck. They can be dull, boring, stressful, painfui, exhausting.
Life is like that sometimes.
But the test of who you are, doesn’t come out when everything is going your way.
Many, many times in life you will do something you don’t want to do.
But you will look back on it and find that you got much more out of it later, than you ever would have expected.</p>
<p>A job is not going to make you happy, your kids are not going to make you happy, your spouse is not going to make you happy.
It comes from who you are inside.</p>
<p>@wis75 It really has. I’m so motivated to work even harder in school, and in college next year. I want to have more options in life.</p>
<p>What haven’t you liked about your job?</p>
<p>Summer jobs and internships are very valuable - they help you determine what type of job best suits your personality. What one person enjoys might be a terrible experience for another. Heck, even performing on Broadway would be repugnant to those with terrible stage fright.</p>
<p>@Northstarmom</p>
<p>I don’t like sitting at a desk for 8 hours copying and pasting server information to an excel spreadsheet. I also didn’t like sending out e-mails, and getting a rude response by one person all the time. Not being able to use any of my knowledge or passion into the work. By not being able to be as active as I want to. I feel isolated were I work. The job is not what I want to do in life. And can be boring. </p>
<p>But what I do like is
T
he people here are nice and happy. If I were to walk down the street and say “hello” people would look at me weird. When I do that at work people will actually stop and talk to me. There’s other interns that were in the same program I was in so I get to move around and talk to them. I’m a pro when it comes to excel now, I managed to build relationships with people here. Everyone here has a family, so it has a warm environment and everyone has pictures on there walls o their kids. I get to actually see what an engineer does.</p>
<p>Funny, how actually typing that makes me see how the good out ways the bad.</p>
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<p>Good observation of the culture. There are workplaces where everyone seems to be either divorced or on their way to it, where spouses are never ever invited to company functions, but everyone looks the other way when a “date” attends.</p>
<p>I told D1 never do anything just for money. If she could remember that then she would do better at her job. She is going into finance, which is driven very much by money. But she would do better than her colleagues if she could be not as attached to it. If she feels she could always walk away from it then maybe the pressure wouldn’t overwhelm her, and push her to do things against her values.</p>
<p>D1 is finishing up her last week of internship. I have received only few distress calls, and it’s after 100+ hours of work with no time off. She’s loved her internship, and she couldn’t wait to graduate to start her new grown up life. If she didn’t like her internship, I would advise her to do something else. </p>
<p>Life is too short to be doing something you hate for 40+ years. Education is a great thing, it gives one many more options in life.</p>
<p>toxic- Chalk one more thing up to your summer experience… when you go in for a job interview, you WILL notice the working environment. You will notice how people dress, if they smile, if they have pictures up. All these things give clues to the working atmosphere and you already know what you like about it.</p>
<p>As for summer jobs that make you work harder. H will say it was a toss up of the summer’s doing landscaping in the south, rolling sod at 105degrees, and being a janitor.</p>
<p>It sounds very much like you are already putting this into perspective.</p>
<p>toxic, you’re being horrendously unsophisticated. you’re mistakening the fact that most intern peons do work that rank-and-file full-time employees don’t want to do or do work that is invented simply to fill time so some higher-up can fulfill a desire to say they have interns to develop America;'s future. You’re mistakening that fact for what a true full-time position to entail. I’d say you wasted your time; you should have spent it learning more about the work of the full-timers or trying to do your job better than your superiors expected.</p>
<p>"I don’t like sitting at a desk for 8 hours copying and pasting server information to an excel spreadsheet. I also didn’t like sending out e-mails, and getting a rude response by one person all the time. Not being able to use any of my knowledge or passion into the work. By not being able to be as active as I want to. I feel isolated were I work. The job is not what I want to do in life. And can be boring. "</p>
<p>Crescent is right about the work. What interns – particularly unskilled, inexperienced high school interns – do when working for a major corporation is work that is make-work or work that no one else wants to do. It’s not interesting work that requires skills and experience: That’s what the executives get to do.</p>
<p>Presumably you came in with no skills and experience. Were you expecting that with that background and not even a high school degree, you’d get to do something exciting?</p>
<p>One important piece of advice: Do not ever post, twitter, Facebook, etc. about how much you dislike your job. People have been fired for that reason. I even know someone who was “laid off” after her supervisor saw her Myspace account complaining about how much she hated her job.</p>
<p>You’ve posted enough info on various threads on CC that if anyone at your company happens to have been following you, they’d know who you are.</p>
<p>The following advice doesn’t just apply to firefighters or to people who use Facebook:</p>
<p><a href=“http://www.firerescue1.com/fire-department-management/articles/859991-Dont-get-fired-for-Facebook-10-ways-to-use-social-media-safely/[/url]”>http://www.firerescue1.com/fire-department-management/articles/859991-Dont-get-fired-for-Facebook-10-ways-to-use-social-media-safely/</a></p>
<p>Good reminder NSM. My kids think I’m a paranoid nut, but while they are on my watch, Facebook stays buttoned down and pretty clean.</p>
<p>Blueiguana had an excellent point back in post 25: do not pin your sense of true personal worth to your job. You are NOT your job - if you’re wise and lucky, you will be much, much more than that. </p>
<p>It’s great if you love your work, but sometimes it’s just great to HAVE work. Right now I loathe my job; the workplace is dysfunctional and my particular position is not a good fit for my job skills. (To make matters worse, I used to have a fantastic job, but my whole division was eliminated in massive corporate restructuring.) But in this economy, I’m still counting my blessings while I’m scouring the classifieds…</p>