I have 2 college degrees and install cable tv for a living.

Figure out what you want to do. Dont wait until grade 12 to start thinking about your future.

I grew up on a small family farm in southwest Western Australia, both my parents are university educated and expected me to go to uni, but as the oldest son I was also expected to take over the farm.

Did okay in high school, wasn’t all that dedicated of a student. I was accepted into a double degree studying environmental biology and cultural anthropology, because why, not the point was to get an education, not a job. I did fairly well at school but I struggled to get a part time job as a shy 18 year old, I couldn’t get student allowance as I was technically part owner of several million dollars of land through a family trust, and my parents couldn’t support me because of a couple of bad seasons and anyway it’s a pretty asset rich/cash poor business.

Because I liked science I applied for a job as a lab tech at a winery, failed to get that but the offered me a job as a cellar hand and I spent 4 months working 12h shifts. Left that job with more cash in my pocket than I’ve ever had before so I spent the rest of that year travelling around Australia and then Europe.

Running out of money I came back to Australia, I had a friend who was washing dishes at Ayers Rock resort, I joined him. Someone in HR noticed on my resume that I had a truck license and forklift ticket and I was promoted to delivering in-flight catering to the airport. Got sick of the bosses nonsense so a girl I was seeing got me a job doing stargazing tours, spent the next several years in various tourism jobs.

Decided at that point I might as well get that education I was wanting. I enrolled in a double degree again, this time in Economics and International Development, it turns out International Development is code for tedious human geography so I changed to Political Science. During my final year a friend of mine was applying for medicine, I thought that sounded interesting, decided to sit the entrance exam and drop economics as I didn’t want maths heavy, complex Econ to tank my GPA.

Didn’t get into my first choice of med school so moved across the country to study, wound up in the rural and remote medicine track. After doing my hospital time I started working in general practice, I found the culture of GP so disgustingly focussed on manipulating Medicare that patient care took a back seat, also on one occasion I was told I needed to start charging a patient a bigger rate because “having patients like that in the waiting room isn’t a good look”.

I decided to leave GP and return to the public hospital system, a mentor of mine thought that’d be a shame and found a small town practice owned by portly British West country ex-navy surgeon who described himself as a cloth cap socialist. I obviously took that job.

He sold the practice a couple of years later, the new owner is as penny pinching and money grubbing as my first GP employer but I now have the confidence to stand up for my patients, I also now know that management telling individual doctors how to bill is considered price fixing by the ACCC. I also have enough experience and reputation within the community that it is best impossible for them to get rid of me.

I probably would have been happy as a farmer, or as a medical specialist or a surgeon although the training might’ve killed me(at the time it was common for surgical trainees to work 24h shifts). As it is I don’t my time between chronic diseases, preventative care, palliation, paediatrics, mental health, and emergency. I can’t imagine a better place to end up.

Tried to GED in 10th grade. Weasled through the rest of high school making deals with teachers to just take final exams. 3 years of linguistics studies in college with no clue where that was headed. Boyfriend, pregnant, married, and random jobs as we moved to different states for his job. Burned my arm and had to go to physical therapy. Stoned on painkillers and amazed by how cool the gym was, i applied to therapy school. Now i work with school kids with physical disabilities. I’m in my car driving from school to school most days and my summers are free. I love that i have an office but don’t have to go there, i get to go outside and see the sun every day, each day is different, i get to work with/on some cool equipment, and working with kids is better than working with adults. I hate my special ed leadership team because they’re selfish, disrespectful assholes who care more about moving up than taking care of our school kids. If i had to do it over, i would change nothing. I would have been to immature to do this job and appreciate it as a younger person.

Second generetions software engineer. 19 years. It’s been good. I’d recommend folks try writing software one time somehow and if they like the puzzle solving bits look into it more. The market is really saturated for new grads now so it has to be something you love.

I’m a software engineer because I’m bad at everything else. Barely made it through college physics class and highschool chemistry. Wanted to do English but can’t write. Didn’t want to follow in my mom’s footsteps but I just can’t so anything else well. Came around in college after a pretty bad first semester.

I was kind of a slacker in school. I did ok, but the pressure I see on kids these days would have killed me.

I made it through a computer science degree because it was fun for me. So much puzzle solving. Even the theoretical stuff was fun. I had a professor who everyone thought was really easy. Folks were getting like 98/100 in the whole class. I think, though, he just tought well. We got it. He made it easy.

These days I work on data things. Nothing fancy. All open though so googling my name will find it. It’s honest work. I got here accidentally. I was taking random tasks and worked on search once time. Was kind of fun. When that job went belly up I spent a while working for something cool. I found a job I was unqualified for but sort of bluffed my way into. Learned a lot.

While I was there I built a search thing that, terrifyingly, is built right into Firefox. Go to the location bar, type @w, hit tab, and type a word. That was me for a while. I’m proud of it. It’s no google, but it’s honest.

Been working in search and data stuff ever since. I don’t deserve it. It’s been good. But I got lucky.

I would recommend leaving on a good note. Over half of my jobs were recommended to me by people I worked with in the past.

I dropped out of college with 30 hours to go, worked a job in construction that was more or less a go-for job and I wasn’t very good at it. I had a friend who did EEGs and needed another tech. I worked at $30/hr doing EEGs. Studied my ass off and got registered, studied more and got a second registry. That enabled me to make $48/hr which is my starting pay adjusted for inflation. Long story short, I should have gone into computer science or finance and been rich. Neurodiagnostics is rewarding in it’s own way, but there is better money out there that isn’t going to make you work your ass off and claw your way back to where you started.

Volunteered in a life science research lab in high-school due to a mix of high school requirement and parental connections.

Went to college, had some personal shit that meant I didn’t really do internships or the like. Liked mol bio but had been aiming for vet school since I was like 5. Tried for vet school and got very denied (meh grades and probably subpar rec letters relatively speaking not to mention a lack of spots for out of state residents).

Got a job in bone research (~25k/y) and moved back to the south. Dad convinced me to try for med school but I realized patient interaction was not for me. Then decided on PhD(30k/y). Got in and moved up north. Finally finished (fairly recently actually), met and married wife during the PhD but had to stick in the area for her so started a postdoc. So now I get 54k/y until the university catches up to the NIH saying 60K (after the recommending committee said at least 70k to stop losing everyone to industry and let people be able to live…).

After wife is able to move, not sure what’s next. I’m going to try for professorship or I’ll have to go to industry.

My entire career has basically been an accident. I majored in history thinking I’d be a teacher because it was my favorite subject and I was 18 and didn’t know what else I could do with my life. Three years in, I realized I didn’t want to be a teacher and most history-adjacent jobs didn’t pay a living wage, so I dropped out. A bit later, I started a temp job working for the state because I needed a job and had call center experience, did a good job and managed to get hired full time. Almost 20 years later, I’m doing work I never expected to be doing but it turns out that I like paperwork and I’m pretty good at navigating bureaucracy and explaining it to laymen. Can’t imagine working in the private sector at this point. I eventually finished my degree (in human services this time) but tbh it was mostly just so I’d have one for my resume.

The biggest lesson from all of it for me has been that kids really don’t need to go to college right out of high school, or at all in some cases, and I’m glad the tide is turning on that to some extent. I’ve enjoyed pretty much everything I’ve done in my career and I’ve benefited enormously by not having a “dream job” in mind. Education is great, don’t get me wrong, but so is flexibility and a willingness to learn new things outside of school.

(Engineer, for reference.)

Loved legos as a kid. I guess that kind of showed where I was going, huh? Also got lucky that my high school still had design and tech-related electives, so I got a leg up on that before I even hit college.

Worked in a tool & die shop for a small company while I was in college. It was a rough job - small business operating on the razor’s edge - but it was a good introduction to real-world manufacturing processes and environments. Having to actually machine and assemble stuff by hand taught me more about designing for manufacturability than any course ever could, and I think every engineer should spend some time making things before they try and design them. Definitely wouldn’t call that particular business enjoyable, though.

Got my first real engineering position at a power generating company. Interesting place. Burned literal turns of garbage to generate power and recycle almost anything they could. Very safety-focused. Honestly, if the commute hadn’t been absolutely awful, I might have stuck it out with them longer, but “spend two hours of your day driving” was just terrible.

Then found my current position, which is as an engineer at a smaller high-tech company in aerospace. Hours are great, co-workers are fantastic, the job is interesting, I like my boss, pay and benefits are absolute dogshit.

The engineering field is definitely one of those where you’re “encouraged” to shop around and switch jobs every few years. I don’t know why. It’s terrible. Terrible for employees and terrible for businesses, who are perpetually losing institutional knowledge. I don’t know why they don’t fix this. I’m coming up on the point where I’m going to have to choose between “a comfortable job” and “a well-paying job”, and I don’t know what I’ll do.

TBH I stumbled into it and fell in love with it upon finding it. Not exactly how I recommend people find their career but it worked for me!

Out of highschool I quit my fast food job and my mother told me to find a new job after a week or so. A friend of a friend invited me to check out their work place (machine shop) and I was in love with the machines, so I applied there. I’ve been in the industry since!

It’s been well over 10 years and I’ve only had 4 jobs so I can’t really give advice on where to look or how to find anything that fits for someone. Especially not in an economically viable way

IT in general.

Don’t pigeonhole yourself to a technology. Move with the times to stay relevant.
Alternatively, be extremely good at something hard.

First job out of college was as a statistician. I couldn’t lie that much.

Then I worked as a microbiologist. It stunk.

Then I worked as a plant breeder, it was fun but the pay sucked without a Ph.D.

Took a job as and international marketing and product manager (paid the same as the PhD). Traveled all over the world. It was brutal but fun. Jetlag and stress started destroy my health.

Took a job as a consultant to farmers. It wasn’t bad until a new CEO decided to change things and lose a ton of money.

Currently working for a smaller company that basically doesn’t care what I do as long as it’s profitable. Contracting research, selling seeds & beneficial insects, etc to farmers. Set my own schedule and do my own thing. I let the CEO know what I am up too once a year or so. Spent most of the last month playing PlayStation after doing way too much this spring. Gotta pace myself after all.

Fast food, waiting tables, short cook, metal fab, school jobs, temp jobs, procurement, procurement analyst, business analyst, designated smart guy.

Most of the jobs were appropriate for the time in my life. Seek people you like working with and a boss who cares.

My career path has been pretty straightforward. I went to a state science and engineering university with a starting major in physics but switched to electrical engineering after two years. While there I had a few student jobs at the various campus labs, helping with research projects and doing some simple programming.

After I graduated I got a job at a small nearby observatory where several friends worked. I started by operating and maintaining the telescopes then did some software work to expand our capabilities.

Once my partner graduated, I found a job in the nearby city at a small engineering firm that mostly did subcontracted work for the big defense companies. I split my time there between electrical engineering and embedded software development.

After several years there, I realized that there was no real path forward due to living in one of the big square states so I started looking and found a job with an established Bay Area company through a friend. Since then I’ve worked at a few different companies, from tiny startups to the FAANGS. I’ve generally moved up every couple years and now manage a large team at a mid sized startup. Like most engineers, I’ll probably never be really rich, but always comfortably employed.

There are three things that really helped my career.

1. College - I know, it’s expensive and such. But even so, it is so worth it. Sure if you get a degree in underwater basket weaving at an expensive private university or it’s probably a financial waste, but STEM degrees are an excellent investment. It’s not just the paper, but the experience, contacts and friends that come from a traditional on-campus in-person university.

2. Friends - The majority of my jobs, and in particular the ones I’ve needed and enjoyed the most came from friends and colleagues. Make those connections, be a good friend, and good things will happen.

3. Hobby programming - I started writing code in elementary school in BASIC. Later in college I would experiment with small programs to scratch an itch, learning C++ and Python from books on my own. Those experiences were vital in my ability to learn how to tackle new problems and learn how to execute when I had to.

Bonus point 4) Reading “Getting Things Done” by David Allen. Seriously, learn to plan and execute. Don’t be a flakey “ideas person”, get shit done.

It has been interesting. I wanted to teach at university so I went straight into a PhD program after my 4 year engineering degree. Found out that being a professor, at least at an ivy league school, was 10% teaching and 90% funding and politics, also did not mesh well with available projects and support, dropped out with “half a PhD”. Worked 12 years at steel mills, the first one sucked but I learned a lot, the second one really developed me into who I am now from an entrepreneurial and leadership POV. Went to business school at night and simultaneously got a Manager job at a shitty company, got fired, got an engineer job elsewhere and quickly promoted to manager where I rocked the house. Left for a senior engineer role elsewhere with better pay and work life balance and I am loving it so far.

Lots of luck, lots of effort, lots of learning through failure and success. Best thing I did was probably business school. The engineering degree is what gets me in the door but the tools I learned in getting my MBA have proven more valuable because most of the problems I need to solve are not exclusively engineering problems.

It was really weird to go from a high performer at one company to getting fired at the next. Thankfully I’ve had two great experiences since then, so I guess it was probably them not me. Getting fired messed with my concept of self worth for a bit but I have worked through that now.