What Your Guidance Counselor Won't Tell You

My choice of career shows a distinct lack of creativity. I am a lawyer. Blah blah boring lawyer, same as the thousands of others that are churned out of law schools every year. 

When I was young, and doing well in school, my parents presented me with two options: law school or medical school. They never even mentioned engineering, probably because they (like me, at the time) had no idea what that was. I never thought to question them, though in retrospect I think I would have enjoyed mechanical engineering. A brush with A.P. Biology in ninth grade taught me that medical school wasn’t going to be an option, so law school it was, and I pursued that goal from the age of 14 on without stopping to consider why. I didn’t even choose a funky field of law, like Admiralty or Aviation. 

(Yes, there are lawyers who dedicate their whole careers to boat and/or airplane law.) I’m just a jack of all trades sub-suburban lawyer.

I wish someone had stopped and told me how many things there were to be out there. I mean, think about it. Someone out there gets paid to say, “No Ben, No Jerry, there isn’t quite enough chocolate in this new flavor.” Someone out there gets paid to figure out how to make the Millennium Falcon out of Legos. Someone else gets paid to name the 48 billion shades of green paint you can find at Lowe’s all something distinctive like “forest floor” and “soft moss” and “edamame”.  

Someone designs guitar picks. Someone altogether different uses their knowledge of molecular science to extract helium atoms from the air and put them into tanks to use at birthday parties. Yet another person translates popular songs from music to Muzak for your elevator enjoyment.

Just look around wherever you happen to be sitting, and consider that someone had to conceptualize, create, design, manufacture, market, do the accounting for, and all the hundreds of other things required to get each thing you see in front of you actually in front of you. Someone else had to create the parts for the machine required to manufacture whatever it is. And someone else provided the raw materials. The chain never ends.

As a member of several on-line alumni and professional groups, I get a lot of job notifications. Recently I saw these three in three different places: Senior Validation Engineer; Senior Monitoring Evaluation and Research Technical Advisor; and Education and Informatics Technical Advisor. Not only do I have no clue what the daily life of anyone with those titles might be like, I don’t even think “Informatics” is a real word. 

When I got out of college and out there in the ‘real’ world, a lot of my friends and young adults I ran into were ‘Consultants’ working for ‘Consulting Firms’. I’m still not really sure what that is, nor am I sure why anyone would hire a 22-year-old fresh out of college to consult with. Shouldn’t big corporations be asking questions of people who have some experience and know what they are doing? 

I think lots of kids grow up wanting to be what their parents are because it is familiar, or the traditional doctor/lawyer/fire chief/policeman/teacher types of jobs. ‘Reality’ TV has probably expanded that to crime scene investigator, crab fisherman, and duck call maker, but still. What child proudly announces to his first grade class, “when I grow up, I want to be a Software Consultant”?

Right now my daughter wants to be a lawyer because she finds it stunning that one can get paid to argue. At the ripe old age of nine when she argues, she says, all she gets is a free trip to her room, and the thought of getting money for the same behavior thrills her beyond description. 

My son wants to be a bio-medical engineer, but only because I told him that was what he needed to be to make fake body parts, and there is enough Mad Scientist in him for that to be appealing. I’m not opposed to either of those choices, but I hope they don’t make their minds up too early. It is a big world out there, and someone has to design roller coasters that people can’t fall out of.