Thread: Career options
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Old 09-12-2014, 05:37 PM   #5 (permalink)
Xist
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Quote:
Originally Posted by Daox View Post
What would you like to do? (disregarding the demand of jobs, pay, etc)
I want to support a family.

Hopefully, my own!

My deployment girlfriend always wanted to be a music teacher. There were many problems with her marriage, but her husband would not allow her to go back to school. She got a divorce, earned her teaching degree, and a year later, found a teaching job in another part of the state. At one point, I talked with a dentist that was deployed with me; I felt that we had similar personalities. When he explained the reasons that he chose dentistry, they made a great deal of sense to me. I mentioned it to the then-unemployed teacher and she asked "What about teaching?!"
"Being a dentist looks really good."
"Okay, fine, dentist or dental assistant."

Where did she get dental assistant?! They have a fraction of the education, a fraction of the skills, and receive a fraction of the pay.

Being a music teacher sounds fun and I would hope the students would enjoy it more than other classes, and behave better. However, it took her a full year to find a job, and she needed to move across the state.

It was frustrating, though. She kept asking me what I wanted to do when I got out of the Army. While I was interested in dentistry and speech therapy, I was most interested in being a husband and a father, so that is what I told her. She wanted to marry me and she had four kids, so you would think that she would appreciate that, but she kept asking the same questions, and it seemed she felt that everything besides teaching was an incorrect answer.

I still want to be an SLP, but after investing two years, I would need to put in five or six more, and between not receiving tuition assistance and the other complications, it just does not seem worth the chance of not getting in. My brother's old SLP was very critical of me "just giving up and throwing away the past two years of [my] life," insisting that, because I am a man in a predominantly female career, and because I am a Veteran, I would have been accepted.

How does that help me stay in, though?

Everybody tells me "Cs earn degrees," and I tell them to do push-ups. Even my friend the professor. I asked him if he earned Cs while earning his doctorate and he wrote "Heh. If you earn Cs in grad school, you are not in grad school anymore."

I do not know how much I would enjoy working in HVAC, but I enjoy fixing things, and while nobody enjoys paying bills, people should appreciate having AC again.

Maybe I could be a mechanic, although I do not seem to be very good at that so far, I definitely have a great deal of room for improvement!

If I knew more about cars, I could help more people!

Dad tried to convince me to move back in with them. He said that he would move his office into the garage so that I could have a bedroom and would talk to people he knew about me learning their trades, but he did not stay around very long.
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