What do you do? WHY?

I'm a freelance writer. I started off as a reporter, worked for a company that does news feeds for companies like Careerbuilder, U of Phoenix and Intuit, and said I could do it better myself.

It's nice to know that I can actually pay all of my expenses from a job that I can do from a Starbucks. On the other hand, it's hard to explain to people that you're actually doing work. Most people also don't realize that up to half the time you're working is spent pitching to new clients and keep track of potential sources of income.

Learning that it's a business and that I don't have anyone to rely on is a bit of an eye-opener at the age of 24, but I truly think it's been the best decision I could have made.

 

I'm an actuary for a small consulting firm. I basically get paid to do math all day, which fits in with my degree in mathematics. I think the best way to describe my job is that I'm a financial forecaster for retirement plans (DC, DB and H&W). We basically tell companies and municipal entities what their plan liabilities are and how much they should contribute annually for future benefits being accrued by current employees.

I make less than most actuaries, but I only work 30-35 hours/week, all our clients are awesome (my CEO refuses to work with people he doesn't like) and I can wear whatever I want to work. The exams are fucking brutal, but I get a bonus and a raise for passing plus study time for each one. All in all I'd say it's a fantastic job, with all the free time I've had I've put on about 25 pounds of muscle and lost about 10 pounds of fat in 5 months, I have zero stress and I get to talk daily with the CEO who is an incredibly intelligent guy.

Can't really complain there.

 

When it comes to most enterprise equipment, DELL (and most other OEM platforms) employees are not even dispatched on service calls, even under the intial direct manufacturer warranty. DELL saves TONS by subcontracting their labor out to companies such as Unisys and others who simply put on a DELL cap when they show up to the data center, which in essence, is a truth they enhance by saying a "DELL-certified engineer" will arrive on site. The DELL-certified engineer can range from somebody who is highly qualified to some guy who studied enough to pass certification tests years ago and lounges around his apartment on contract, waiting to be dispatched.

By "ehancing the truth", we typically are just steering the prospects attention away from situations that generally have less than a 1% chance of occuring, and should that unique situation occur, we are still equipt to handle it regardless.

 

I'm a recent graduate with double majors in Political Science and French. With the economy being the shit is in right now, nobody wants to hire a poli sci/french graduate.. hell I don't blame them. So I mainly concentrate on looking for employment, sometimes volunteer for a local music organization, and experiment with photography. Apparently I'm better at photography than I am at debating politics, and I have a degree in politics and absolutely no training in photography.

Stay away from Politics and French, it's the new Philosophy Degree (or has Philosophy finally become something where you can get a great job in, with ease?)

 

Philosophy is the new Poli-Sci in that philosophy students test better on the LSAT. Mainly because the LSAT largely tests analytical philosophy skills. If you take a class on symbolic/deductive logic, the LSAT becomes easy peasy.

Then you realize that Law is not nearly as fun as Philosophy of Law and you cry yourself to sleep, trying to figure out how your life went so wrong.

 

Higher education administrator. I essentially make sure that my institution retains our accreditation, gains new specialized accreditation, and monitors and assesses the student learning that occurs on campus. Of course to do so I sometimes spend days making sure that t-pins are all arranged at a perfect 45 degree angle in our student project exhibits or processing thousands of dollars worth of sticker tab receipts (don't ask), but I also conduct internal education policy studies and facilitate all sorts of faculty workshops.

I had no idea this type of position even existed until I fell into it. I have an undergrad in Econ and English and then went onto law school. I hated my law classes and most of my peers, and so fell back on my undergrad efforts and secured a job in education policy. My legal education has been an advantage (my current position requires a doctorate, which usually takes 6+ years, but my 2.5 years of law school and a J.D. was deemed acceptable), but basic writing, reading, and professionalism have been most important. Surprisingly, seeing as this is an education industry, no one has asked for my transcript or GPA- they trust me for my work product.

Education quality assurance and assessment is a growing field and currently full of unfulfilled faculty turned administrators. It would be really nice to see people take it (education quality/assessment) as seriously as they take many other fields of the humanities.

Until then, I'm just glad for job security...

 

ok I'm still in school (4th year), but I've worked 3 or 6 month internships, and had high school (sporting goods store) bullshit jobs, etc.
I've also worked construction with my dad and/or his friends.

It seems I've always had more to show, and it seems I've always done "more" per day in construction then engineering.
I don't know if that's just me enjoying seeing physical, tangible progress, or if it's so much easier to "slack off" in an office job.
I mean, sometimes I'll catch a problem where I'll stay an hour late trying to design a model that works, but the typical day to day just doesn't excite me. I enjoy it, but it's still just seems too "standard" put your time in collect a paycheck type work.

I'm rambling now, but a question for the older members, how have you managed to keep excited, and challenged about the work you do?
With the situation I'm interning at right now I could easily see turning into a full time job, but I can also easily see the work I'm doing turn stale and monotonous.

like I said, I'm rambling. I guess I'm looking for how do you avoid falling into a bland pay-the-bills job, and instead maintain interest and enjoyment in your job.

edit: bonus if it relates to mechanical engineering

 

The only thing I've ever wanted to do with my life is to be a sports broadcaster, more specifically a hockey 'play-by-play' guy, and I'm blessed to be able to do so on a weekly basis. I watched Hockey Night in Canada once when I was six, and I fell in love with the sport of hockey. I played it for 11 years, and quickly realized that any future I had in the sport would be from the booth and not on the ice.

I'm the guy who you'd see sitting in the top row at the Pacific Coliseum (aged 16) with a hand-held voice recorder calling games for practice.

I'm the guy who did the PA announcements for his high-school, and also did PA announcing for the local Junior B. hockey team.

After attending broadcasting school, I got my first radio job two weeks after graduation. I got my start in Northern British Columbia hosting a music morning show, producing radio commercials, and calling 45 hockey games on the radio for a Junior B team up North.

Two-and-a-half years ago I moved to Saskatchewan to become "Sports Director" for three radio stations. My current job duties include the following:

- Read morning sportscasts for three different stations.
- Host a weekly sports show which I created. (Monday nights, at 8 PM for one hour.)
- Report and cover local and sometimes national sporting events (2010 World Juniors from Saskatoon)
- Call 40 regular season hockey games in for our local Junior A hockey team plus all playoff games.
- Call 10 additional regular season games for a local Senior Hockey League.
- Voice-Tracking for our Classic Rock Station (6 PM -8 PM during the week, 1PM -7pm Saturday and Sunday.
- Emcee sports dinners, and banquets.
- Host remotes from various businesses in town.

I confess that I'm somewhat of a work-a-holic, and I get paid overtime to host remotes, the sports show, and voice-track.
I also work part-time for the Junior A team as their Media Relations Director which earns me roughly 400 extra dollars a month.


The perks?

- I'm doing the EXACT thing that I've wanted to do my entire life.
- I'm getting paid better than most other medium market hosts because of all of my overtime.
- I get to do the 'sports thing' while still getting to dabble with DJ'ing for a Rock Station.
- Traveling on the bus with a hockey team is so much fun (especially when they're winning). I've got stories galore from my various road-trips.
- Introducing bands at concerts, and more often than not getting paid in 'free booze' to do so.
- My job has allowed me to meet and interview some of my favourite sports figures: Darryl Sittler, Gordie Howe, Jeff Francis, Joey Votto, Marcel Dionne, and David Eckstein are some of the more prominent names.

The suck?

- Waking up at 4:45 AM every morning.
- There are lots of narcissistic, douchy people in radio who consider themselves celebrities. Sometimes they ruin the fun for everybody else.


How to Get In?

- Network like hell.
- Go to broadcasting schedule
- Be willing to move ANYWHERE to get your feet wet. Too many people in this business aren't willing to pay their dues.

My ultimate goal is to call games in the NHL someday, but the next goal I have is to call games in the WHL. I hope to be there in three years.

 

I'm a 2LT in the army. Right now my days consists or doing to jobs the senior officers don't want to do while I wait to go to my next school. The army is both the best and worst job I've ever had, but when I got out after my first enlistment I found that I hated being a civilian- I felt diminished if that makes any sense. Although I do miss being a full time student sometimes.

 

Can those of us who are about to be employed ask questions? If not delete away.
Has anyone here worked for the government? Specifically a job requiring a security clearance. I currently have an awesome internship in law enforcement that guarantees me a job with a police dept. pretty much anywhere. I would eventually like to go federal, but I used to like to party (alot). If anyone has experience with doing background checks or getting security clearance, please PM me.

 

I'm an Environmental Consultant.

My work primarily involves hazardous waste sites - investigations and determining cleanup options.

I started out doing this partly out of idealism, and partly because it was a practical career for someone with a bio degree. I started out, as one friend describes it "poking at rocks with sticks". Going into abandoned factories to collect samples was cool, as was going to project sites and catching fish, bugs, mice and and a variety of other mammals.

Unfortunately, with experience and the need for more income (e.g., a house and kids), project management beckoned. Now I spend most of my days crafting budgets, tracking budgets, reviewing invoices, reviewing reports, marketing, etc. I no longer do the things that used to interest me because clients will only pay for someone a few years out of school to complete those tasks. So now I shuffle paper. I am smack dab in the middle of middle management, at least in our industry, and have a constant target on my back during our ever more frequent rounds of layoffs. I come on here when I can, to relieve the boredom, and drink most evenings, to relieve the boredom.

And I am attempting to find other employment, so you pimple faced burger flippers with no more responsibility than figuring out where to store your Anime collection can keep it to yourselves.

 

I'm a "senior" software engineer (except I'm one of three people in my department under 30, and one of them is an intern).

I got into it because I loved playing video games as a kid, and I thought "hey, I'd like to make cool things like that." As it turns out, playing video games isn't quite the same as programming, but by the time I figured out, I also noticed that I enjoyed programming (kind of like a crack addict enjoys crack, anyway). Eventually I did some graduate research in AI, then got tired of being poor and got a job. Mostly, I stuck with it because I get a kick out of solving problems, but I occasionally have trouble grasping the more abstract stuff (math, physics), nor am I patient enough to be an experimental guy (bio, physics, chem).

In a given day, I probably spend 50 to 75% of it doing coding or technical design for projects I'm assigned to, and the rest answering random questions that come up, or doing "code reviews". Also, once in a while, I get called in to a design meeting or an interview, or to help put out a fire on our production system (metaphors!). I alternate between bored misery and manic glee, depending on what my main project is at the moment. Since I got promoted, my mood has tended towards manic glee, because I get a wider variety of things to do.

My tip to aspiring programmers would be to do some actual internships, get summer jobs, whatever while you're in college, but also, learn the fundamental principles. If you want to do anything other than monkey work, you need to understand how these things work inside and out. Otherwise, your job can be done by "Steve" Nahasapemapetalon over in Bangladesh, and he'll do it cheaper, too.

Amen, brother. Sure, you might emphasize the more relevant/modern stuff based on where you're applying, but don't bullshit. You might get past the "Human Resources" guys, but a real programmer can spot bullshit from a mile away. We had a guy come in here for an interview that filled his resume with buzzwords, but when we asked him simple technical questions about stuff he put on his resume, he couldn't produce any answers - the guy's been programming for literally longer than I've existed, too, which is kind of sad.

 

I run the sales department for a division of the industrial automation company I work for.

Graduated with dual degrees in marketing and business admin.

I fell into the job by working part time at a smaller company owned by a friend's father. The small company got scooped up by the much bigger company which kept me on. I was still going to college at the time, only working 20-30 hours a week but was making more money than my parents because the sector I was selling to was going through a rather large boom time (see automotive factories established in the Southeast starting in 2000).

When I graduated I stayed on because there was no way I was going to find an easier job that would pay me nearly the amount of money I make.

My title indicates I have some type of management role but 90% of my job is direct sales. Sales commissions make up the bulk of my pay because there is no cap on commission where I work. I'm a mobile manager spending approximately a day a week in the office. I travel the rest of the time on the company's dime visiting factories and corporate headquarters of fortune 300 manufacturing companies. With the scare that the last recession put in American manufacturing my job has never been easier. Companies are bringing work back to the US and are looking for US suppliers more now than ever.

The only projects I personally sell are large scope/scale. Since I rely heavily on commission I don't waste my time with the one-time/small time projects that will take just as much effort and time as the big stuff. The sales cycle for these projects is usually somewhere between 2-4 months, but some of the larger ones take years to get off the ground. Once things are quoted I make a few phone calls or emails a week to each active account and then sit back and wait. Therefore I have a lot of free time on my hands.

As long as I'm closing orders and keeping our factory busy no one gives a shit where I am or what I'm doing. I no longer have a set vacation time or limit as if I'm not selling I'm hurting myself the most. However thanks to technology I can work as easily from a boat, ski resort, or beach somewhere as I can from my office. Most of my sales staff has either worked for me for 6 years and grown use to my hands off approach or they're the new generation of college grads that love the fact that I'm not breathing down their neck and prefer email/text to actually talking to them. The only reason I even agreed to be a manager is that on top of my own commission % I get a cut of the total divisional sales as well.

In industrial sales you need to be a self starter/motivator. For the first year unless you're extremely lucky you'll probably only pull down about $60k in salary and very little commission. However after your first year when projects start coming in and customers start trusting you you'll double that. By year 4 if you keep your existing accounts happy and add only 1-2 more big ones a year you'll be earning four times your starting pay. One top of that all your expenses are covered, you get to play plenty of golf, travel to conferences in nice climates and take your customers (or your friends in my case) to sporting events all for free.

I've been doing this for 10 years now and while it isn't the most glamorous profession, I can't think of any other "real" job that would afford me the freedom and financial gains that this one has.

 

I'm a scientific consultant with a degree in Chemistry. My job is to sell my knowledge of government regulations to industry, to get their butts out of hot water. It is glorified neural prostitution, and it's a real challenge to not feel cheapened by thinking of yourself in 15-minute increments.

I originally wanted to get into forensic arson investigation, but I started school right about the time CSI kicked it into high gear, and the damn school was flooded with Grissom-wannabes. I managed to luck into this job 2 weeks after graduation, and am still one of the only people I know who actually got a job in their education field... So I guess you could call me lucky.

It's not a bad gig if you can get it - people will pay a ridiculous amount of money to save the trouble of having to learn and do stuff for themselves.

 

I'm an intensive care nurse in a very busy metropolitan hospital. Prior to that, I worked as an ER nurse.

I chose this job after years in the finance/banking industry. Nursing was something I was always interested in but never really pushed myself to do... until I spent months at the hospital with my daughter in neonatal ICU. I realized two things.

One: That life is too short to not do what you want to be doing.

Two: Those people made a phenomenal difference on a DAILY basis.

I love my job. I love going to work every day and not knowing what to expect. I love the adrenalin rush of a code situation. I love the fact that my knowledge and experience can help make the difference between life and death, that I can support the family through a rough time and be able empathize. To put it simply, I go home at the end of a shift with the knowledge that I made a difference.

There is no typical day at work for me. I could be looking after an abusive drug addict who came in after an OD, I could be looking after a 25 yr old who got hit by a car, or an old lady at the tail end of cardiac failure. Some of my patients get better, and I get to discharge them to the ward, and some of them die.

To do my job, you need a degree in nursing as well as post graduate qualifications in critical care. You need to be motivated enough to keep up with the latest practices in patient care. You need to have a lot of stamina (doing CPR for any length of time is demanding work) and you need to be able to shake off the job once you go home. You need to have a wide base of knowledge in relation to anatomy and physiology, as well as medications and illness pathology. Most importantly, you need to be able to speak up, even to the Consultant doctors, because you are your patients advocate.

Don't become a nurse if you think it's going to be just like on TV. You won't get to fuck doctors in the on call room. You won't get to spend your day chatting with friends in some hidden storage room at the hospital, and you won't get to shoot hoops with George Clooney in the ambulance bay.

What you WILL get to do is clean up an inordinate amount of bodily fluids, dodge projectile vomit, make fun of people for having foreign objects in body cavities, bet on blood alcohol levels, and every now and then, as part of a team, use our knowledge to save someone's life.

 

If this post doesn't fit the bill feel free to delete it.

I'm a student in biology/chemistry and I work as a pharmacy technician for CVS. My usual week consists of me getting up around 8am for classes and attending said classes until noon, with two evening labs each week. Two to three days out of the week I work at the pharmacy, where I interact with a wide range of people. Some of our customers are just the average guy, some people are really nice, and some are assholes, and the majority don't know and don't care.

The problem with working at a pharmacy is that the only people you see, aside from your coworkers, are generally sick people. They aren't usually pleasant. Combine that with a constantly hurried work environment that focuses entirely on meeting every customer's demand makes it pretty high stress sometimes. Also, the company that I work for creates a job where 75% of my duties and stresses are not actually directly meeting the customers needs, but meeting the minimum scores that CVS sets for us. If I don't meet these scores, I get in trouble. They range from important (verifying patients medications and dosages) to the useless (scanning the club card when we ring someone out).

One of the major perks to this job is that I am friends with my pharmacist and can pretty much look up any kind of information I need at any time. My knowledge of drugs has also increased vastly.

I am planning on going into a science/human physiology related field and the one thing that working in a pharmacy has taught me is that I never want to be a pharmacist. Unfortunately I also don't have a very wide knowledge of the rest of the world and am trying to widen that. I'm not sure on what I want to do when I graduate but I have plenty of ideas. One of the things I learned from reading the old board is that everyone will tell me to follow my dreams, so that is what I plan on doing.

I don't know if we have any pharmacy people on this board but if anyone has questions about that sort of job I'll try my best to answer them.