Career options are like flocks of girls

Disneyworld crushes
As a teenager I discovered a phenomenon that seemed unique to flocks of girls in public places.  From thirty feet away, any group of girls my age was appealing.  The larger the group was, the less closely  I looked at any one of them.  I once chased down an all-girls marching band at Disneyworld, completely infatuated with all of them.  Only after chatting up the whole group and verbally committing to spend the afternoon with them did I realize that not any one of them was actually that cute.  (Shallow?  Yes.  But then again, what else are you supposed to build a relationship on during spring break at Disneyworld?)

Late in my college years, I found that girls en masse are not the only ones to exhibit this phenomenon.  Career paths are very similar.

How to find the keepers... after the jump.


Career crushes
You may be interested in nutrition. "I like learning about what I eat and seeing the effect on my body."  That sounds reasonable.  If that statement described me, I would consider ways to build a career in nutrition. Please be careful at this stage.  Identifying an industry or an interest as a possible career field is like spotting a large group of the opposite sex in a food court.  Before committing to spend the rest of your life with them, take a closer look.   Is there any one specific person in the group that you are interested in getting to know?  Is there any one specific job in that industry that you would like to have?

Case in point
My degree was in Mechanical Engineering.  After some non-researched thought, I decided that I wanted to work in aerospace.  If I could get EXACTLY what I thought I wanted, I would end up in military aerospace.  There is not much cooler technology in the world than fighter jets and guided missiles.  Spare no expense!  Build the best without the usual restrictions of profitability or commercial viability!

It turned out that I landed a summer internship at Honeywell Propulsion in Arizona in the manufacturing Center of Excellence. It was absolutely the perfect internship for me.  I was working in the group that built Auxiliary Power Units for fighters and (drumroll...) the turbine engine for the M1A1 tank.  Arguably the coolest piece of equipment in the world.  M1A1s launch rifled high-explosive anti-tank artillery while driving over ditches at 60 MPH.  This was a project using state-of-the-art technology being made for a customer with deep pockets.  It sounded perfect.  It wasn't.

Being an intern, I expected my job to be boring.  Fetching coffee, making copies... I wasn't expecting much and I wasn't too good for anything.  My goal for the summer, however, was to find the person whose job I wanted so I could go back to school and become a person who could take that person's job.  My responsibilities were coincidentally very well suited to that end. 

I was in charge of documenting drawing changes.  In short, I had to prepare a lot of documentation and then collect signatures from the managers of every group that would be affected.  Several times each week I spent an afternoon collecting 10-12 signatures from groups all over the campus.  I made an effort to observe the working conditions of each of them and ask about their careers.  (One of the joys of being an intern is that most everyone is happy to offer career advice.)

After a few weeks of doing this, I was amazed to find that not only was my job pretty boring... but so was EVERYONE else's.  A conversation with one of these managers would go something like this:

Me: So how long have you been at Honeywell?
Her: Uh, fifteen years.
Me: So what kinds of career advancements have you had?
Her: Uh, I spent ten years in this group as a Staff Engineer I, then a couple of years as a Staff Engineer II, and I've been the project lead for nearly three years now.
Me: (Yikes! Fifteen years on this project?!) Cool.  Can you give an example of an interesting challenge that you've had to overcome?
Her: Uh, last year we started the upgrade from Catia version 4 to Catia version 5.  The user interface is very different, so it's taken a lot of getting used to.
Me: (Seriously?  The most interesting challenge has been upgrading your analysis software?!) Yeah, that could be tough...

I was heartbroken.  Here I was deep inside a company that was as close to my dream job as I could imagine, surrounded by thousands of engineers doing things I had no interest in doing.  I didn't know what to do. My infatuation with engineering was gone. 

Make mistakes early
The good news is that I didn't have that experience any later than I did.

Here's the message for you:  If you're interested in nutrition, GREAT!  Go find a SPECIFIC job in that field that is actually interesting to you BEFORE you commit to years of study.  Don't let yourself fall in love with an industry at a college fair.  Girls from a distance can look attractive, and so can industries from the outside.  Shadow an established professional.  Find an internship.  Read industry publications.  Find a specific person that has the job that you want, then become the person to take that person's job.