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Non-Traditional Career Routes?
Dave Bieler asks: "With such
a broad range of interests in science and technology, it was not easy for
me to decide on a major in college. Currently, I am an Electrical
Engineering major at Penn State, however I have considered several other
majors: Computer Science, Computer Engineering, and Physics. Since
science and technology is booming, it may be possible to get into a career
in an area other than that traditionally associated with certain majors. ex -
a Physics major becoming a Computer Security specialist. I'm curious to
hear about any careers that were preceded by non-traditional paths."
Speaking as an Electrical Engineer who decided to drop that and go into
computers, this question strikes a bit of a chord with me. Has anyone
else gone to college intending to prepare for one career, only to fall
into another, either by luck or design?
Don't we get these questions at least once a month asking about:
:)
"What should I major in"
"Is this major better"
"What did you do with your major"
etc...etc...etc...?
I just seems to me that we do. Mod me down, karma cap lets me be like this
Get your Unix fortune now!
I have a master's degree in English Literature, with an emphasis on Early English Literature and Folklore. I have presented a paper at a conference, had it published in the proceedings, and was probably going to pursue a doctorate.
But I met my wife, moved to the city where she lived and needed something to do. Pursuing a doctorate in her city would have been problematic (Ask me about in-state school rivalries sometime you want an earful.) so I went in to law school, figuring if I made it out I could do wills and real estate transactions.
While there, I worked on the college's computers. This wasn't a big leap since I had been using and playing with computers since I was making sprites move on my old Commodore 64 and figuring out how to cheat at Jumpman. I turned that part time student job into a full time job and dropped out of law school.
So that's the story of how a guy who used to have the tale type index numbers memorized now sets up webservers, writes code for a Novell network, and when needed does helldesk.
That's like saying that pre-med courses are useless, 'cause you can't do anything with just it. Poli sci degrees need some grad work to be useful.
I've seen several people use it as a starting point for some quite interesting careers.
Every year during my review, I just pray the words "slashdot.org" aren't mentioned.
I have a physics degree, and I work with XML developing a web solution for insurance companies. I find that day-to-day, I use none of the specific knowledge I gained as a physicist, but every day I use the problem-solving skills, observation skills, etc., that I gained.
Colleges and universities will need to learn that there's only so much they can do, and that education continues when the student receives their sheepskin.
I graduaded high school class of 2000 and I had no clue what I wanted to do. Sure, I knew I had to go to college, get a degree, etc. I couldn't be humpin it at some store for the rest of my life. Well, I had been screwing with computers for some time so I said "sure! why not?" and signed up to be a Comp Sci major at my local university. God that was dumb. In my 5hr calc1 class I realized that I hate math. I had been always okay with it, and with good teachers had been able to noodle my way through pre-calc. However, when paying $500 for a class - i realized it sucked - just a little too late to get a refund.
Thats when I realized something very interesting.
I had taken 4 years of Spanish in highschool, a year in 8th grade, and a few summer plus program classes. When I started classes I was offered to start in a 300 lvl spanish class. I took Grammer 210 to be safe and went from there. What was sweet was that I got retro active credits from Span 101 up to 210. I got 18 credit hours for the price of 3. I then found what I wanted to major in: Spanish.
Now, before you laugh, let me point out that I realize this: It is like majoring as undecided. With a major in spanish, and then I can minor in whatever, including another language, the sky is the limit. Lets say I get burned out on computer shit and just want to use them in my free time - well, with a comp sci degree, that would be too bad so sad. With a language degree, especially in Spanish, I can get a job really anywhere. If I want to work for Boeing, Sprint, etc. I am in like flint. If I want to work for FBI, CIA, etc. I just need to minor in Criminal Justice. Even then, Its not a requirement. If I want to work in the tech sector, I am fine there with a degree and my tech experience.
If all else fails - you will find me teaching for my alma mater for $25k a year (in KS - that goes far) and summers off
The ultimate network admin tool needs HELP!
I did undergrad in engineering physics, PhD in astrophysics, then found out that pursuing a professorship is a difficult proposition.
So I switched gears entirely and took up quantitative finance, and I'm now working on a trading desk doing modeling and risk management.
Kind of an unusual route, but that's the advantage of physics - it gives you a broad background in math and problem-solving that you can apply to lots of different fields.
Other people in my engineering physics class have gone on to do aerospace engineering, law, business school, programming, architecture, and lots of other stuff.
So: do physics. It's fun, suitably geeky, and it opens lots of doors for the future.
All opinions expressed herein are not my own; I haven't had free will since last year when aliens ate my brain.
No college/univerity, but been architecting Investment Bank trading systems for the last few years - and yes, we are making money...
Pick something fun to study at university (or "major in" if you're in America), then pick something that pays well when you graduate. Don't ever expect your degree to be relevant to your job. FWIW, we routinely hire engineering/science grads over CS for both s/w development and junior trading jobs.
"Business majors" generally end up working for HR...
This sig left unintentionally blank.
Park ranger in Yellowstone park, maybe!
No more late night calls, beeps or "gotta fix the server ASAP!" Emails. No more lost sleep, hurried meetings or pissed off customers...
"Please don't feed the bears." :-D
The only common thread through these last twelve years has been a good attitude and a commitment to learn. I look for those qualities in everyone I hire. My staff includes ex-grade school teachers and philosophy majors, and all are doing well!
Helevius
You are actually choosing your subjects based on a future career? That's interesting.
In my view, few of us has any idea what we are going to be doing twenty years from now. We don't know which industries will be big, which will fail, or which all-new fields will be open by then. Especially at college age, you don't know what you will still like to do in ten or twenty years time (when you get upwards of forty, you start having a pretty good idea about it, though).
The way to choose your major is really to take two criteria into account: what subjects do you actually like; and what subjects will give you a broad enough foundation to be able to keep on choosing your path many years from now.
Majoring in something you really dislike just because there's plenty of jobs, because your family expects it, or because it carries with it an aura of status is a huge mistake. You might be doing that stuff for most of your life - do you really want to be unhappy with your job for most of your working career?Chances are you'll drop out - either at college or later - so you might as well choose something you actually like instead.
Getting a broad, foundational education is just as important. Sure, being a trained Cisco engineer pays a lot of money right now, but will it still do so in fifteen years? And what if you want to change to something else? The basic sciences are a good choice: physics, math, computer science, chemistry - they all tend to be useful almost no matter what you decide you want to do with your life later on.
Me, I waffled between Computer Science and Literature. I took CS and mathematics, and I haven't regretted it. Do I work as a programmer? No (though I might go back to that again in a year or two).
/Janne
Trust the Computer. The Computer is your friend.
You could start a web-based community of geeks which sit around all day discussing nerdy topics while the cash flows in from ad banners. After it gets really big, you spend yourself doing more interesting things, occassionally breaking yourself away from your anime tenticle rape to get involved with the community by bitchsla-
Wait a minute...
Shit. Nevermind.
Why bother.
I don't see much correlation between degrees and people's careers in the real world.
Most of the really hot-shot computer folks I know have degrees in English, or psychology. Just because that was interesting to them, and then they wound up working in computers.
Myself, i went to art school and have a degree in fine arts. Not useful for computers, but I don't think many poeple "learn" computers in college anyways. I was doing illustration and comic books, then wound up doing a lot of computer graphics (because it pays well) and now here i am working for NASA doing research for medical uses of technology. Each career step was perfectly logical for the choices and opportunities I had available.
This next year I'll be going to Kenya, Brazil, and possibly Afghanistan for work, and there's no way anyone could have pictured this career path back when i was in my first painting class debating what kind of canvas to use.
Don't sweat your major, study what interests you, and get a degree in anything. Having 4 years of focused work is all that a degree means. You're going to learn everything on the job that you need to know -- from your peers, and books in your own time.
Recursive: Adj. See Recursive.
Consider quantitative finance. I have a BS in Mathematics and a MS in Materials Engineering. Currently I work on Wall St along with many other engineers/physicists. We do more computer programming and mathematical modeling than any engineering job that I've held prior to this. One advantage is that Matlab/Unix/Linux is very prevalent in quantitative finance. The technical skills that you learn with an engineering background are very helpful in a field such as this.
Another place where an engineering degree helps is Law. I've heard that it is *very* easy to get into law school with an engineering degree. There's not enough technical attornies, but there is definetely a need for them, especially in patent law. I have a friend who was studying chemical engineering at my school as an undergrad. He went on to law school and is doing well as a patent attorny.
Although I can't speak about patent law, I do know that quantitative finance is very challenging and interesting. It involves more problem solving and analytical thinking than even the best engineering jobs that I've seen.
Keeping
is that I entered college intending to major in Physics. I had the test scores, prep courses, and grades, and was granted a full four-year scholarship at a prestigious College.
Then they screwed up. I was lumped into an "experimental" program that rushed a bunch of us through first year Physics in the first semester, first year Chemistry in the second semester, all in Freshman year. Six months later, few of us could recall much Physics. It didn't help that the Math Department used a different symbology from the Science Departments, either. Long story short, I told them where they could stick their rushed Sciences program (the faculty there had decided that this wholesale abuse of students was the proper response to Russia's Sputnik - after discussing the matter for about ten years). But I still had them on the hook for the full four-year scholarship.
I graduated in Philosophy after _finally_ writing the thesis that this particular school required of all Bachelors candidates. Along the way, I played some poker and some pool (I'm still almost good), hit some decent parties with a few stunning women (my friends didn't know how I managed that), used and lightly dealt drugs among friends, rode a nice motorcycle, traded roommates to share a dorm room with my girlfriend, read and wrote about Plato, Aristotle, Hegel, Kant, Marx, etc.; that was a great time.
[To all you young guys in college now: while it's a different era, be really good to the first girls you date at school, I mean _very_ nice, if you get the chance and get my drift. At my college, the ladies restroom in the Library had two lists on the wall: a Green List, and a Black List. I got on the Green List, so I met lots of women while I was there.]
The school had an IBM 1401 computer with a Fortran compiler. The Physics Department was still trying to figure out how to use it for anything instructional. As I recall, they assigned us to calculate a pendulum equation, in Fortran, using punch cards, not realizing that the trig and log functions had been broken by Seniors before graduation. It was also understood that most guys would end up working in the Defense establishment, but I wasn't very enthusiastic about building bombs, no matter what the salary.
Summer before my Senior year, I got a job mounting tapes for a local service bureau on second shift. They had a Honeywell 200, 4' high X 4' wide X 20' long, 32K magnetic core memory, a card-reader and an optical-tape reader for input, 5 X 1600 bpi tape drives, no disk drives whatsoever, but a line printer. Well, I learned how to program it, hacked a datecard loading routine in H200 Assembly language, plus logic to ensure that multiple updates of the master tapes always ran in the proper sequence, built them machines for reviewing their optical tape files, supervised operators, learned COBOL, extended their specialized accounting applications, gambled to drop my student draft deferment only to draw a high lottery number, and watched billions of dollars flow from the CIA to Air America through a regional airplane leasing/services firm (whose small town accountant we happened to serve) while being thankful that I wasn't in uniform or otherwise anywhere near places where people were shooting at Americans.
My former Economics professor offered me the job as Director of my alma mater's Computing Center. I told him thanks, but no, battered about a little, got a job programming COBOL, taught myself IBM S/360 Assembly Language, got promoted to Systems Programmer, rolled out a statewide financial network, etc., etc. After several interesting jobs later, I've spent the last 15 years consulting for IT VPs, CTOs, and CIOs.
Maybe I'm old-fashioned, but I believe that all you have are your values, honor, and personal integrity. Let them guide your career choices, and you will always walk tall.
That's a quote from Mark Twain, a smart man.
School gives you a piece of paper, and maybe some education, but it doesn't determine who you will be or what you'll do.
I started off majoring in chemistry back in '87. I started programming in about '79. I was a really good programmer. Chemistry was something I got interested in after a poor year of chemistry in high school and studying organic chemistry during my summer break and really loving it.
What I learned is that what interests me is not necessarily what I should study. I dropped out for a year, then went back as a computer science major and eventually dropped out and got a job as a programmer.
The classes I look back on as providing me with the best education, were my chemistry and English classes. I was way ahead of my Comp. Sci. program. I wrote a Pascal compiler just so that I could pass out of the compiler class. I showed up to my assembly language class twice. The first day and the final exam. I got an A+.
I'm not bragging, I'm just saying, school is one thing, education is another, and your choice of profession yet another.
I'm lucky, I can make a good living in my chosen profession. It's something I love to do and I'm good at it.
I'm 33 and my education is far from done. I learned a long time ago that I learn better on my own. Since then, I've studied physics, languages, chemistry, medicine, law, you name it, I've stuck my nose into most of it. I'm not a genius, and I'm not as good at any of these as I am at programming, but this is my education. School didn't educate me, except to let me know that I learn better without it (save the English and Chem classes).
Study what makes you happy. Then get a job that makes you happy, in whatever field. Take it from me: Making good money at a shitty job sucks, and making mediocre money at something you love is awesome. That's the only thing you should consider. Consider school 4 years of a chance to learn things you don't know anything about and to learn more about the things you want to know. When it comes to getting a job, go after what you want to do. Forget about which profession will make you the most money (unless that's what makes you happy).
Do what you want, not what others would suggest you do.