What is the reality of a career as a ______that you wish HS kids knew before they went to college?

Parents Forum
81

A few things to consider if you’re thinking of teaching:

  • Do NOT go into education if it's about the vacations I won't lie-- they're a wonderful perk. But teaching is so all-consuming for at least 10 months a year. If all you do is wait for the vacations, you'll be miserable.
  • Find out NOW about the realities of the job market. In many parts of the country, there are tens of thousands of teachers out of work. And they're all licensed and they all have experience. (The exceptions are frequently Physics, Chem, and Secondary Math.) That's not meant to discourage you, it's meant to warn you: you'll need to be competitive. Start now to build a resume that will set you apart from the competition. Think about what you major in-- can you double major to make yourself more competitive? What can you coach or moderate? Is there a local high school that can use a Debate or Model UN coach? Do you have any yearbook experience, or can you work with a local school during college to gain that experience?
  • Consider very strongly the disadvantages of graduating with your Master's Degree. Sure, I know that in many states (like NY) you'll need it anyway. And the colleges make it look so enticing.

Neither a resume nor an interview can tell an administrator who will find success in the classroom. The only thing that indicates that is experience. So new teachers are at a disadvantage there. The one big thing that a new teacher brings to that interview that an experienced teacher doesn’t is a lower price tag… unless she has her Master’s Degree. Then she’s more expensive, but has no experience. Don’t be so quick to give away that advantage.

  • It takes a lot to make a good teacher. But it STARTS with knowledge. You've got to know your material, and know it cold. You need to know what they learned last year and what they're learning next year. Don't consider ever walking into a classroom without a very good grasp on what you'll be teaching. If you're entering college, hang on to those HS notebooks. You may be surprised at how helpful they'll be.
  • You've got to be good at communication, so consider a public speaking course as an elective. I speak to groups all day long-- it's my job description. You can't be an effective teacher if you can't confidently speak to a group.
  • As you get to Junior and Senior years, start to think about a professional wardrobe. Exactly what that means will differ widely based on geography and the type of school you end up in. But I can promise, it will differ significantly from your college wardrobe, and it's not cheap to build. So start early. And for Christmas of your Senior year, request an "interview suit" -- or at least "Interview outfit."
  • As you student teach, and eventually get a job, there will be things that you think should be done differently. Don't assume that you're the first person to make the suggestion, so make it tactfully. The odds are very good that your idea has already been tried, and didn't work for one reason or another. Just about every policy in effect in my building is there as a reaction to a specific problem or situation.

All that said, I have the best job in the world. I honestly love what I do, and can’t see myself doing anything else. The teenagers I spend my days with are wonderful kids, and I love what I do.

82

Anybody able to comment upon engineering?

83

Engineering …
I’m coming from a systems/software perspective, although it should apply to mechanical and electrical as well. Civil, chem, etc. maybe or maybe not. I don’t claim the below as absolute truth, but it reflects my experience.

While it is portable and there are jobs in both large and small cities and in many regions, sometimes you’ll have to move to find the job you want.

Mostly you end up working for other engineers, and there is some truth to the stereotyped personality.

Some jobs are mostly support: documentation, planning, project management. These are tedious, but necessary.

The learning cannot stop when you leave college. The successful engineers I know work just as hard to learn new things as they ever did in school.

A bachelor’s may be enough, a PhD might not be. I know a lot of MS & PhD engineers who work for people with bachelor’s degrees. The H1b visa rules encourage this. With a BS and a decent GPA, a US citizen is easier to hire than a person needing a visa. That H1b candidate will generally need a MS. I’ve known several excellent engineers with Phd’s, but have also known some that could never make a decision. The degree doesn’t help at all when corporate trims the payroll. This is true in both large (10’s of thousands) and small (10-20) companies.

People who get into it for the money often try to move into management prematurely, and too often successfully. It’s hard to stay as an engineer, at least in many companies, for more than 5-10 years. It can be done, but you may have to pass on a “promotion” to do it.

Your HR/personnel/whatever people will not understand you or your job, but they will tell you all about it. Sometimes they are really insulting about it. You have to take this and smile.

Being able to communicate is pretty important. Writing, public speaking, and the act of peacefully exchanging difficult technical ideas all matter. The tech writing class and the public speaking class both have been useful.

You will, at some point, be more expensive than a fresh-hire. Understand this, and know that your personnel department considers you about equal. Figure out how to demonstrate that you add value to the bottom line. Every. Single. Quarter. Two bad quarters in a row and you may be done.

Still worth it though, if you love making things. If you’re just doing it for the money, then maybe not so much.

84

Yes, they would. Smaller regional universities typically have higher teaching loads. I’m not sure what they are at the Cal States, but I’m betting that they are something like 3/3 or higher.

And yes, @dadof1 is totally right about cultivating relationships being the key to getting a good career - probably in every field, but especially in academia. They make it sound like it’s about merit, and that the smartest, hardest-working students are the ones will get rewarded. Well, you have to be smart and hardworking - but you also need connections and mentors who will show you how to do things and help you segue into positions. That’s even more important now.

I got this postdoc in large part because my graduate school advisor knows the director of the postdoc. And I’ve observed it happen in the transition from postdoc to assistant professor a lot. I’ve been asked repeatedly if I thought I could “start my career” here at my university, with the implication that if I wanted converting to a full-time faculty position would be easier here than going on the market and that I could leverage that into moving elsewhere. (It’s a very good university, and would actually be a great place to start out professionally, if not personally.) And one thing I’ve learned a lot recently is that many many people - both inside and outside of academia - got their jobs through knowing someone who could place a phone call and talk them up.

85

Engineering question

My husband is a “recovering engineer” as he likes to say. He graduated with a mechanical engineering degree and worked at a plant and disliked it. (he may have liked it better at a firm that designed things etc) But, in college he was crazy good at calculus and science and they gear you towards engineering at Texas A&M if you are good at math and science. He is now a financial planner and is a CFP. He uses his love for numbers and has his own company.

They gave the engineers in his class a personality test his senior year and he and one other guy were the only people in their quadrant. (stating he does not fit the normal engineering profile). I thought it was interesting that they gave the test in the senior year and that the test was accurate and could have been helpful earlier on when he was selecting a major. So, I think it might be good to take a personality profile test to see if engineering is a good fit. I know many engineers that have gone into management with or without an MBA and are very successful. He always says that he relates better with analytical clients due to his engineering background and is thankful he went to a top 10 program but that he certainly would have had more fun as a business major. :slight_smile:

86

Gosh: more to worry about. The current Engineering/CS thing is huge for middle school kids right now. My 12 y/o going to engineering camp tomorrow and neither of us even understand what an engineer does. Hopefully the camp will guide her as a do or don’t.

87

I think 12 is a great age to explore different options. My oldest glommed onto computer programming early - in elementary school. There was never any question about what he’d do when he grew up. But I think it’s far more common to be good at a lot of different things. I was given a vocational aptitude test in junior high. I scored sky-high on every thing except clerical speed and accuracy. Luckily being a secretary was not one of my career goals! I did eventually learn to type fast (thanks to the internet), but never particularly accurately.

88

My advice to young engineers is that they should learn how to write well. They will probably be writing lots of reports and making presentations. Being able to communicate effectively is very important.

My husband and I are structural engineers. We worked for other companies for about 13 years, then started our own consulting firm. It’s great working from home, but it can be all-consuming. We pride ourselves on meeting deadlines, no matter how crazy they are. So occasionally we have to pull all-nighters. But the positives are that we can buy whatever resources we need without getting approval, and we don’t have to deal with office politics! And if we want to leave at 10 am on Friday to go up to our cabin, we can.

I would recommend thinking about what kind of environment you want to work in. I had a two-month stint last year at a big engineering company downtown. They were overloaded and needed help temporarily. Oh, my gosh!! It was a labyrinth of cubicles! And the walls were so tall that a woman of average height wouldn’t be able to see over them. It was one time I was really happy to be tall. It was such a “blah” place to work. Everything was gray and people didn’t talk much with one another. I really don’t think I could work there permanently. Coincidentally, the daughter of a friend had a cubicle close to mine. Her mom shared that she was pretty miserable and was thinking of switching out of mechanical engineering and trying event planning!

89

Regarding advice:
(1) I think there is some advice that applies to all jobs, even to working for oneself. @MaineLonghorn has mentioned some of it, so has @50N40W. That would be that usually you cannot rest on your laurels indefinitely, but must work to keep your position by remaining visible, communicating well, and being someone others want to work with. (Don’t know if the last was mentioned yet.) Those are some universal principles. A work environment is not similar to being a student in (undergrad) college or high school, in which the location is “set up” to please or respond to the particular age that you were then. And although some companies have a young feel virtually and chronologically, everybody there is not working to please themselves but ultimately to please others. Even the top person answers to a Board, to stockholders, etc. And these days “the top” is evaluated, sometimes formally, by employees. On a campus you can avoid or snub people you don’t like. In a work environment it’s best to have as few enemies as possible, preferably zero. Stating your mind to someone you do not like, even if that person is very low on the totem pole, can get you fired if that person is favored by someone above you. I think learning office politics and accommodating to that – given that almost always these will be strangers – is perhaps the toughest initiation in any job.

(2) I think that it’s important to look at the activity within a career, whatever the career, because there are a lot of misconceptions about what someone with a particular title does every day. When we’re young and romantic, we think of careers in a romantic light. But a physician has to spend at least some time administering, lawyers heading up their own firms have to look at whether the books are being balanced, and.dreaded staff meetings are a staple of most, even small companies. Virtually every white-collar employee in every company will find himself or herself having to write reports, log records into a database, or present some kind of a summary to a higher-up. Most employees, even in management (I was in management) spend at least 50% of their time writing reports. You write progress reports, status reports, marketing reports, proposals. Yes, it’s an issue if you cannot write, but it’s even more of an issue if you really do not like to write. Welcome to the world of business.

Many occupations that appear “glamorous” or “mysterious,” filled with creativity, innovation, and/or intrigue, are often much more humdrum than people realize. Example: sounds silly, but one of my former boyfriends was a private investigator. I had a kind of TV fantasy about what that was like – involving excitement, danger, and helping to solve crimes. It turns out that it’s mostly drudge work: research ad infinitum to locate people (not driving around in a car to find people — the TV concept). Etc. Hours of tedious research before you get a lead.

(3) Differentiating the environment from the task is also crucial information to have ahead. For example, just because you work at a glam tech place like Apple or Google does not mean that you personally will be designing products or software. You might be, especially eventually, and especially if you were hired to do that, but you might instead be working in some other aspect of the business as a business (again – marketing, administration, etc.) Similarly, a realtor doesn’t spend all of her time looking at beautiful houses. Some of them may be beautiful, others quite ugly, and even if they were all beautiful, you’re not spending your time sitting in them all day! That’s for open houses. If you don’t like selling, don’t become either a realtor or an insurance agent, because in both cases most of your time involves acquiring leads – many of those cold --, following up on those, and trying to close a sale.

Does most of your time on a job involve selling, purchasing, proposing, researching, reporting, interviewing, calculating, cataloguing, or instructing? Will you be isolated during those tasks or largely in a “social” environment with employees you would never be friends with?

So I’d say the most important thing to tell a young person considering a career, is that the one thing a career is not is academic study of the subject matter. That’s what you do when you’re a student, and it’s really fun. As someone actually working in the field, you are performing a specific function or several of them – functions which bear little in common with the theory and academics of that field. You may like to study engineering; you may or may not like to be an engineer; you may love to study legal principles; you may or may not like the practice of most legal fields; you may hate writing briefs, and lots of trials and pre-trial hearings are amazingly boring. Not a lot of drama for most even criminal attorneys. Legal procedures can be boring and so can trials, which may involve something relatively petty, like possession violations. You know that if you’ve ever sat on a jury.

90

And just one more thing, although I know my post was really long:
It’s astounding how often I meet young people who are working in retail and really have/had no clue that their main function would be interacting with people! What were they thinking? That they could be mute, disinterested, and act bored or annoyed when customers had legitimate needs in the store? That if they wanted to, they could rearrange the shelves or look at clothes and ignore customers? This never happened with my own children, but I have certainly seen it in kids from privileged backgrounds. They act horrified to be having to interact with the hoi polloi. I once filled out an application for a large retail chain. The main thrust of the application questionnaire was the attitude of the applicant toward people: Do you think that you’re smarter than most people? Do you wish that most people would be more efficient or less talkative?

So you know, if you want to work in Bloomies, Neiman-Marcus, or Nordstrom, it’s not about the merchandise, It’s about your people skills, your approachability, and your attitude. (I realize that those are not necessarily career goals in themselves, but people who want to work in fashion typically spend some time retail, as do many people who work in retail business or marketing and may want to go very high in some commercial arena like that.)

91

I’ve walked out of stores where no one asked if I needed help or I couldn’t find someone to ask. Lighting stores are the worst! I ended up buying new lights on the internet after walking out of two of them.

92

@mathmom, yes, and then there is the evil twin-someone who hovers over you, following you around constantly when you just want to LOOK and consider for yourself. Furniture stores are big culprits here.

93

Scientists:

It is relatively easy to get into a Ph.D. program. Ph.D. pays YOU money. Plus, as a low income Ph.D. student you receive many benefits, such as medical (free or almost free), cheap campus housing, etc. Long hours of work. Approximately 4-5 years.

After Ph.D. comes PostDoc. Small salary, 2-5 year contact. As a PostDoc you are expected to learn to get your own funding. Again, long hours of work.

Tenure-track Prof. - holly grail of the academic research. Not likely to get there. Most scientists move out of academia into a variety of jobs after Ph.D. or after the first PostDoc.

Most importantly,

  1. Science is a self-driven obsession. If you are self-driven, able to work independently (when all your coworkers went home and you are the last person left in the building), you may like science. This job provides unparalleled freedom and flexibility. However, if the project is not working - you don’t have a team to back you. There is plenty of help available, but YOU are ultimately responsible for the results, good or bad.
  1. It is relatively easy to move out of science. Plenty of jobs available for Ph.Ds: industry, education, legal, government, health care. The absolute majority of PhDs move out of academia.
94

Does anyone have any advice for polisci majors?

95

If the plan is to go to law school with that polisci UG, keep those UG costs low and grades high. The legal profession suffered a serious adjustment during the 2008 recession and hiring has not come back to pre-recession levels. Jobs are hard to come by and do not pay as well as they did 10 years ago. A law degree still has value of law is your passion but be smart about how you get there.

96

I was a political science major and chose it after deciding I wanted to be a lawyer. It was good preparation in that you would have a mid-term and a final or a paper. In law school, there is only one test usually (the final). This was difficult for my friends that were used to having multiple tests and participation grades. Due to law school admissions being down, I have heard there is scholarship money available if you are not trying to attend a top tier school. I would definitely apply to many colleges and apply for any scholarships they offer.

97

I should’ve been more clear: advice for polisci majors that will actually go into the field of politics, not law. But good advice!

98

“Going into the field of politics” covers a lot of things.

Politician seeking election? Staff of such? Lobbyist? Activist? Political writer? Diplomatic/consular staff? Military service?

99

My advice to young engineers is that they should learn how to write well. They will probably be writing lots of reports and making presentations. Being able to communicate effectively is very important.

@MaineLonghorn made a powerful statement, but left it hanging. The above referenced statement regarding Engineers is often time overlooked by Engineers. Yes, most Engineering programs entail at least one “English for Engineer” (Technical Writing?) course, often times taught by someone from an the English Department who has no clue about “Technical Writing”. As a young Engineer, I struggled with writing Technical Memorandums, Letters to other departments, etc. Public speaking is also very critical part of career success within an Engineering environment. Maybe things have changed in Engineering Programs, but Technical Writing and Public Speaking was pretty much non-existent when I went to Engineering School.

I quickly learn that although you work in a highly technical field, office politics often dictates how critical it is navigating the minefields in front of you, based on what is written and presented. Engineering is not all about the technical issues, as a lot of projects get shelved for non-technical reasons. Office politics within and between departments, can override technical competencies. A Young Engineers have to be able to master not on the technical aspects of their career, but understand the non-technical aspects of their jobs and understand the subtle games that are played within any organizations. By way of example, the decision by Kodak, who technically developed the Digital Camera as far back as 1975, yet chose not to proceed with that technology, due to the perceived threat the digital technology had on their very profitable film business. The rest, as the saying goes, is history.

Finally, High School students entering College should look beyond the obvious careers and look deeper at niche careers that are not talked about very often. For example, should one major in Nursing or pursue a degree as a Clinical/Cardiovascular Perfusionist? Should my BSN be the terminal degree or should one look beyond to the very lucrative Certified Registered Nurse Anesthetist (CRNA) field?

100

I chose human resources as a career . In grad school, I was taught how to motivate others, teach them to lead, and to develop others. In the 80’s we were gearing up for the tech revolution where organizations would become think tanks and people would work in self managed work teams, seeking to continuously grow and help the company, by doing so. I have to say, it was actually like that in NYC in the 90’s for several years…and then… Well, you know the reality. So, I would give advice to those who, like me, want to help people and make money today is that if you go into human resources, it is a very lucrative field. You will definitely use your business and people skills. But, it will come at a price. Mostly, you will be either laying people off or dealing with companies after lay offs, and helping the companies deal the huge emotional cost. You will not be doing what you learn to do in grad school. It’s a high burn out field, and it takes its toll if you remain. So while I wouldn’t dissuade anyone from going into it as a young person (did I say it’s a high paying field?) If you go in, make plans to change your career about 10 years into it for your own mental health. Friends that didn’t do that paid the price with their own physical health.