Why did you choose your trade/career?

[USMarine75]

 

[jaxadam]

I didn't choose it. It chose me.

 

[gabito]

I always wanted a career as thread necro-bumper, but decided I couldn't tolerate the pressure so I went to work with computers. It's alright.

 

[Fenriswolf]

I know that most everyone I know here in Texas working a blue collar job eventually wishes they weren't, whether that's 10, 20, 30 years down the road. My father's a diesel mechanic and fabricator/business owner and my uncle is a master welder. It's definitely done a number on their health as they close in on retirement age, but the field has treated them well for the most part. In the US the biggest downside to most blue collar jobs is sub-par benefits and unreasonable insurance cost.

As someone who's been working blue collar jobs in Texas for the past 10 years, you're either built for it or you aren't. Especially in the plants, but it depends on where you are. There's some places where you'll 16 out for your 13 days, and some places where you'll have your 5 8s or 4 10s and other than the voluntold over time everynow and then, OT is voluntary.

On one hand, fuck yes I wish I wasn't in this field, I mean have you ever been so hot and sweaty you had to go to the portojohn after you farted because you don't know if you just blew some sweat off or shit yourself? On the other hand, I'm damn good at it, and the couple times I've tried an inside job, I've gone stir crazy and haven't ever made it past a week.

As far as how I chose my trade, I was drunk and explained how rotary engines worked to one of my buddies, and he suggested giving being a millwright a shot. I was out of a job at the time, so I said fuck it and went to trade school, and it turns out...ya, I got enough of the tism to be a millwright.

 

[Hoss632]

I got into my field frankly because I got fired, and needed a job quickly so I didn't lose my apartment. 13 years later I'm still in the industry. I work in a very "niche" field of maritime transportation where I live for the biggest company of it's kind in the state. I'm still here because the family that owns the company (which has been around since 1939) has taken very good care of me. I've met people from all over the world that I honestly would never have gotten to meet otherwise. And learning about different cultures and their countries has been pretty awesome. I don't drive anymore so i don't get to have those conversations as much. But that's definitely the plus. The pro's are if you are good at what you do, there's a place for you in the industry as the shipping industry is world wide and runs 24/7 365. Downside is you need to live in a city/town with a port that would require transportation. Hours can be long some days and very short on others as it's a very even flow industry. At this point in my life it's pretty much all I really know. I have learned some management skills and how to multi-task. I'm now at a point though where I have a nice work life balance, I work 3 days on/ 3 days off (13hr shifts). So plenty of time to enjoy hobbies and family. Another downside on the driver stand point is going into some of these chemical plants. It's definitely not helped my health in ways, which is one of the reason's I'm ok with no longer driving and just being in over night operations/dispatching.
If I was able to do something else graphic design would be one of the first things, mainly because I love comics, and comic up with design logo's, lettering etc is something I've come to love in that industry, especially having befriended a few folks.

 

[Demiurge]

I work in insurance claims. Not the "oh, my fender" types but the "oh, they're maimed/dead" types. I worked in healthcare throughout high school, college, and after college and was predictably burned-out. This left me desperate for a change, and I was recruited by a life insurance company for a sales position which, while a total bill of goods, brought me in proximity to the property & casualty side to which I jumped ship quickly.

It's a shit sandwich of a job: there's a lot of bread but always an open-face-sloppy-joe amount of shit. It wears on the soul. But I get to work from home- yay!

 

[KnightBrolaire]

I originally wanted to go to art school for illustration, but I met people in the field that convinced me to not go that route, so I ended up pivoting to medical microbiology/immunology (a degree my school made up so premed kids could graduate with something useful). I was halfway through the program and did a bunch of shadowing. Most of the doctors were recommending other healthcare fields due to the shit hours, crippling debt, and lack of flexibility or work/life balance. The doctors I knew in the army shared similar opinions, so I ended up switching to nursing.

I honestly picked nursing because it has pretty good pay, flexible hours and has a huge variety of specializations within the field.

 

[Randy]

Lifelong entrepreneur here.

Most of what I've done has been a spin-off of working in music when I was younger. Graphic design, multimedia production and website development, which was all stuff I was doing for my band(s) when I was in high school. I still do a bit of that, also picked up luthiery and I've been working in broadcast for the last few years.

 

[BlackMastodon]

Because it pays well and I did well in math and science in school. I graduated in electrical engineering but was completely burnt out after my BA so I don't plan on going to do grad school, and I'm also not interested in being middle management so won't do an MA or anything. I've just been racking up experience in the automotive industry to be a Sr. Engineer, working for one of the Big 3. The work itself is kinda meh, but the money is good and I'm doing something I'm actually interested in.

 

[BlackMastodon]

Following your strengths in math and science to electrical engineering is a solid move. No grad school plans and bypassing the middle management hustle—that's a unique path!

Gotta find that sweet spot on the Responsibilities vs. Salary graph.

 

[thraxil]

In high school I was good at art and Physics so I went to college thinking I'd double major. Freshman year, I discovered that the Physics 101 and Introduction to Drawing classes, both unskippable pre-reqs for every other class in the respective programs were both only offered at the same time, so I could only take one or the other. So I made a practical decision and went with Physics. After a few years, I realized that actual careers in Physics were either teaching Physics or doing research, which these days involves spending a lot of time securing funding so you can then spend years working out the mass of an electron to one more decimal place or something similarly uninteresting (to me, at least). I particularly liked the E+M part of Physics, so I transferred to a school with an engineering program and switched to Electrical Engineering. After a year of that, I was getting tired of the endless PDEs and noticed that I was actually really enjoying my programming classes, so I doubled up my class load and managed to graduate with degrees in Computer Engineering and Physics and got a programming job.

Now, almost 25 years later, I still like programming, but I generally hate tech, computers, and all the companies, jobs, and market forces in the tech industry. But I have a mortgage and its pretty much the only way I can get a six figure salary right now.

 

[jaxadam]

I particularly liked the E+M part of Physics

E & M was the hardest class I ever took.

 

[thraxil]

E & M was the hardest class I ever took.

A friend of mine who was in my intro E+M class and also taking Linear Algebra the same semester commented that he felt like Gauss had personally travelled through time to fuck him. I feel like E+M was a peak for me because while it was super hard, it still felt like there was a tangible connection to real-world stuff that I actually cared about. Like, if nothing else, at least I understood how my guitar pickups worked a little better. Relativity, particle physics, quantum, etc. quickly starts to feel very disconnected and academic. In retrospect, some of the ways of thinking about solving problems from Statistical Mechanics probably had the largest impact on me and I can now really appreciate it, but at the time I'd probably have said that was the hardest class. Also, fuck Fluid Dynamics. That was probably the one that made me never want to see a differential equation again.

 

[jaxadam]

A friend of mine who was in my intro E+M class and also taking Linear Algebra the same semester commented that he felt like Gauss had personally travelled through time to fuck him. I feel like E+M was a peak for me because while it was super hard, it still felt like there was a tangible connection to real-world stuff that I actually cared about. Like, if nothing else, at least I understood how my guitar pickups worked a little better. Relativity, particle physics, quantum, etc. quickly starts to feel very disconnected and academic. In retrospect, some of the ways of thinking about solving problems from Statistical Mechanics probably had the largest impact on me and I can now really appreciate it, but at the time I'd probably have said that was the hardest class. Also, fuck Fluid Dynamics. That was probably the one that made me never want to see a differential equation again.

We only had like 6 people in my E & M class. One dude never showed up the whole semester and just took the midterm and final and said he just looked everything up online. All I remember was Green's Theorem and Stokes' Theorem and a bunch of triple integrals reducing to surface integrals and just math math math math math and no physics. Our General Relativity course was supposed to be the deal breaker for grad students though. That was basically just tensor calculus. Particle and quantum were actually really good classes because the professor was awesome and his background was in QFT and Condensed Matter so he actually assumed we knew the math and taught us how to think. For example, he didn't even "know" the integration by parts as uv- int vdu, he just looked at the equation systems as a whole and "knew" what the parts were and hell half of that shit (like an int vdu) would just move to the other side and cancel something out anyway. I mean he really took you beyond just rote mathematics and showed you why things were a negative or what a part (Heisenberg ihbar d/dx) was really doing to the wave function. Worst shit I ever did though was the Frobenius method in Advanced Engineering Mathematics.

 

[Moongrum]

E & M was the hardest class I ever took.

at my school for physics majors, E&M was three separate classes that were a progression (i, ii, iii). I was originally a physics major and took the first class, and it was so difficult. I know physics is based on the physical world, but it was way too abstract for me. Eventually I graduated as an Electrical Engineering major, and that had it's own E&M class for engineers. Way easier (still hard for me though), I was able to not think about how/why it worked but just made sure I'm plugging the right values into the right equation lol.

 

[BlackMastodon]

At the university I went to, all engineers were required to take Static Mechanics in 1st year, but then starting in 2nd year the EE's were required to take completely different courses than the other engineering disciplines, so we took all thinks electrical when they had to do Dynamic Physics in 2nd year, which I heard was absolutely miserable. Not that we had it any better; Electromagnetic Waves and EM Particles in 4th year was a mindfuck of abstract thinking and triple integrals. Fuck Maxwell-Faraday equations, all my homes hate Maxwell-Faraday equations.

 

[Grindspine]

I fell into my current career.

I started college as a biology major, but would often say that I wanted to do something in medicine or something in music.

I was doing better in my psychology minor classes and had some issues with biology professors, so changed majors to psychology and got a psychology degree with a biology minor. The psych degree got me into the medical field and the biology minor got me into medical lab work. The medical lab work eventually led back to doing a year of medical school for my current job as a histotechnologist.

Concurrently to that, working on some friends' guitars got me some guitar tech and stagehand work, which eventually led into a part-time radio tech job. I ended up taking a full-time guitar tech lead job at a well-known musical equipment distribution company, then eventually went into sales. After a year of the cutthroat, shark tank that is commissioned sales, I opted to go back to the medical industry, but often regret it as I work in a high volume and high stress lab with more responsibilities than my pay grade warrants.

 

[HelenKellersCaddie]

I got through school expecting to just sling concrete my whole life for my dad's company until the economy took a shit and the company went under. Therefore, I fucked around in high school and didn't get shit done, barely graduating. I ended up still slinging concrete for a couple years, until I realized that it sucks ass and there's other options. At one point, a project manager noticed I was good at what I do, and I'm proficient with computers, so he asked me to go to school to get into project management so that I can start assisting him and becoming a junior PM.

I went and got my 2 year degree in Construction Technology from the local CC, and as soon as I graduated, he ended up leaving the company. I got offered a position at a local structural engineering firm as a draftsman (drafting was a big part of the program at the college), where I actually applied myself and learned quite a bit. From there I ended up being a project manager for a couple construction companies until I got to where I'm at now as a designer for a mine.

My current career is fantastic and I love my job. I get to draw and design some super cool shit, and the perks of the job are top notch. It's funny because I have the artistic talent of a 3 year old and the mathematical skills of chimp, however what I do need for my position I excel at, so everything seems to work well. I essentially chose this path simply because of the circumstances around me and making the best of what I could.

 

[jaxadam]

It's funny because I have the artistic talent of a 3 year old and the mathematical skills of chimp, however what I do need for my position I excel at, so everything seems to work well. I essentially chose this path simply because of the circumstances around me and making the best of what I could.

That’s all I could even ask for. I am in the process of hiring two more people, and I could almost give a shit less what your background is or what you do, I care about how well you get along with people and how adaptable you are. You can teach smart people anything, and those characteristics lend to people excelling. People inherently want to do a good job and excel, and we try our best to offer a compensation package that is motivating enough that the whole team benefits.

 

[HelenKellersCaddie]

That’s all I could even ask for. I am in the process of hiring two more people, and I could almost give a shit less what your background is or what you do, I care about how well you get along with people and how adaptable you are. You can teach smart people anything, and those characteristics lend to people excelling. People inherently want to do a good job and excel, and we try our best to offer a compensation package that is motivating enough that the whole team benefits.

For real, personability and the ability to learn are the best characteristics of anyone wanting to excel at a professional level. I'll take a guy who wants to do what he's been asked of rather than a guy who knows how but doesn't care. Having worked in several team-forward environments, the ability to get along, listen, and cooperate is more valuable than what many people consider. I think what also drives a good team is a good leader. I had a previous position that was a good job, but the boss didn't enforce shit so it ended up being 3 of 7 people doing all the work and the other 4 dicking around. Since that job, only 1 person of those 3 is left and that team is unfortunately sinking fast.