Dragons & Jetpacks discussion

Wow, there are so many interesting jobs here.

I'm a high school teacher. I like my students because I feel like I can relate to them more than I can to adults, but it's not a job I can do for a long time.

After teaching, I want a job with less human interaction, maybe as an editor, so that way I can read a lot. But my parents want me to join their business in furniture, and that sounds like a safer bet. Choices, choices.

Rinn wrote: "Yay, archaeology! <3 I miss proper archaeology..."

Yup. Spent entirely too long and stayed late doing some analysis for someone who is not going to be happy that it doesn't entirely show what they think it should show, and that we are missing some of our latest data thanks to some system changes etc... fun, fun, fun :(

No reading for me tonight - headache and sleep (grump, grump, harumph :P )

Migraine for me also... although Ben & Jerry's plus codeine seems to have done the trick, so I'm trying out some reading... hopefully doesn't bring it back!

Rest up, Freya <3

Take it easy you two!

Obviously we have engaged our brains far too much today ;)

Well, I just recently retired and I still haven't figured out what I want to be when I grow up. I have done a plethora of jobs during my life. Here is a brief synapses:

I had the usual run of the mill jobs while in High School: janitor, fry cook, house painter (I was terrible doing this, not much better now either), and even mowed lawns and washed cars for extra cash.

After High School, I became a medic in the Army during the Vietnam War. Not much to say about that except I hate wet socks. I got tired of sleeping in the mud, soooo...

I joined the Navy and went into Nuclear power. I volunteered for submarines and served on board the USS John Adams, SSBN 620. It seems rather ironic to me that I had to go under water in order to be able to sleep in a dry bed. The Adams was a ballistic missile boat (hence the 'B' in the designation) and fit my philosophy on war – hide so the enemy can't find you. And that's what we did – run silent, run deep. I consider my submariner experience to be a success as my number of surfaces equaled my number of dives. My nuclear experience was not so fortunate. While working inside the reactor compartment, I received an overdose of radiation (don't make me angry), and it was suggested to me that I would be wise to limit my future exposure. Soooo....

I got out of the Navy and went to college (College of Charleston in South Carolina), where I obtained a BS in Mathematics with concentrations in statistics and numerical methods (writing computer programs to solve equations.) With my new degree, I was ready to take on the world. Soooo....

I landed my dream job at Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory, a particle accelerator located just outside of Chicago. I was assigned to the D-zero lab, which was the fixed target experiment. Instead of colliding two particles, our lab just smashed them into the wall. I was writing code to determine potentiometer settings that would give our neural network the smallest possible error. This was BY FAR the best job I ever had. However, after only one year, the government cut funding and since I was new, I was one of the first to get a pink slip. I was devastated and needed a job, soooo....

I took the first thing I could find, which was a high school teaching job. Even though my degree was Math, the school decided I should teach science (chemistry and physics) since I had a lot of real world experience. Teaching was probably the most depressing job I ever had. The students were so unprepared for even the most basic concepts and I wondered how some of them even made it that far in school. The first test only 3 people passed, and I was told by the principle to tone down my tests (which were not any more difficult than what I had in high school) to make sure everyone could pass. Since the pay was abysmal, I got a adjunct faculty job at the community college teaching Algebra and Statistics. I could only last two years teaching and decided to pimp myself out. Soooo....

I got a job at a maritime company as a troubleshooter. I traveled all over the world working on ship board systems, mainly electrical. Motors, generators, switchboards, pumps, mooring winches, hydraulic systems, elevators, you name it. If it was on a ship, I repaired it. The more experienced I got the higher my fees became. However, I had to work long hours and be away from home for extended periods of time. I once worked 80 hours a week for 20 weeks straight, and another time 100 hours a week for 5 weeks. I averaged over 3000 hours a year for my last 8 years and I just got worn out. Soooo....

Now I am retired, receive a nice enough pension that I no longer need to work, and can do whatever I want. So if I want to read, I guess in a sense I do get paid for it! :-D

Late to the game here, but I'll join in anyway.

I'm an RN working as a Quality Management Admin for a BIG insurance company. It's a pretty boring job, but I'm pretty good at it thanks to the super fast scan reading skills I acquired by reading all the time as a kid. After years of going to school and struggling to find my way as a nurse, all while juggling 3 kids and a husband, I enjoy the peace and quiet of working from home and letting my brain go numb.

I'm kinda all over the place with books I like...I've had long spans of reading nothing at all, so I feel like I don't really know where to start. So what are all the cool/nerd kids reading?

Niles - what an amazing working life you've had!!

And yet more professions to add to our profession bingo. We should totally do that...

I'm a Post Award Specialist. I handle the grant accounting for research scientists at a large research university in the U.S. We study earth sciences: geology, oceanography, atmospheric, ecology, etc. I have worked a number of years in accounting at the university, but this has to be my favorite position. Our faculty, graduate and undergraduate students go to all corners of the world. I really do love what I do, though the day to day bureaucracy can be wearisome.

Niles, that is a pretty insane CV there - though I am glad you still don't know what you want to do when you grow up :P As you say, you now have the time etc. to try a load of things out or just catch up on reading :D

Wow, I never even knew there were so many different jobs out there while growing up, and i don't know if there are so many varied options even now where I live.
As for me, I'm a medical student. Completed my medical degree, and always seem to be preparing for M.D postgraduate entrance exams :D

Rinn wrote: "Migraine for me also... although Ben & Jerry's plus codeine seems to have done the trick, so I'm trying out some reading... hopefully doesn't bring it back!

Rest up, Freya <3"

Awful! I just had three days in a row with migraines. I woke up with them. The last one I started treatment with a sumatriptan injection, which I save as a last resort, and later I still needed another sumatriptan tablet and a hydrocodone to finish it off. I average three a week. Triptans have saved me, fortunately.

Same Audrey, I'm on day 3 although it's more of a 'lurker' than a full blown one at the moment. I slept 9 hours last night which is way more than usual and nothing...

We should start a migraine sufferers support thread ;) Haha!

I'll join the migraine thread. :( I wasn't able to read yesterday due to the vision issues.

I started out thinking I wanted to be a lawyer, did a year of law school and decided I wasn't the right personality for it so I went back to grad school and got my Masters in Social Work. Then I thought I'd work as a social worker in the school system but somehow ended up working in medical settings (first in physical rehab, then inpatient psychiatry, medical/surgical, and now outpatient clinic) which is where I still am to this day. I currently work with severely injured veterans, mostly dealing with TBI, amputations, severe burns, and PTSD. It's a lot of direct, face-to-face work which, being the introvert that I am, means that when I get home in the evening I am emotionally spent. I love my work and being able to help people but once I'm home I definitely need my down time to recharge, hence my love for books. :-)

Ah noo Shawnie :( that's annoying! I don't get vision issues in that way, but I end up going into full on hibernation mode (light aversion, lack of appetite, stabbing pain) and a great desire to attempt to sleep it off!

I can imagine that's a pretty tough job Veronica! I perfectly understand the need to recharge too :)

Rinn wrote: "Same Audrey, I'm on day 3 although it's more of a 'lurker' than a full blown one at the moment. I slept 9 hours last night which is way more than usual and nothing...

We should start a migraine su..."

I have a support group on Facebook. I don't get the aura; just eye strain. It does make it hard to read at times. If I'm too ill to read but not too ill to think, I'll listen to an audiobook. If I read too long at night (which of course is my favorite thing to do) I often wake up with a migraine. I also need 10+ hours of sleep each night to help avoid them, so I feel like I'm sleeping my life away at times.

Please move back to Oxford, thanks <3

Anthropologists rock :-) My original degree before I did GIS was anthropology and Geography

Its great as i get to do a lot of the social and cultural parts for projects in Africa as well as the mapping side. Really keeps it interesting

Student here, would graduate as a structural engineer by this summer.

I love reading and writing a lot. When somebody appreciates my writing, it makes me ecstatic like a little child. Nothing else does it for me.

Reading is fun, but devouring my books is much more satisfying.

But one needs to really good at making money and this pressure might end up taking any fun out of it.

I work in a college as a lab technician in chemistry. I used to work in pharmaceutical lab. I also studied in music and teach piano in a music school for a very short period of time.

I only have an associate degree in Information Technology Programmer/Analyst. My official title is Installation Programmer I. What I essentially do is program medical transcription templates using HTML5, CSS4, VBSript, and various other web based languages. The templates are used by medical transcriptionists to create pretty looking documents that are either printed, faxed, and/or exported to another system but they are usually much more complicated than that.

I too will jump on the migraine band wagon. I get terrible migraines where I feel like I have to shut myself into my house with no lights and no sounds on top of taking medication. Luckily, I have one of those jobs in which I can occasionally work from home to make that happen.

School! ha ha, I have no idea what I want to do with my life.

I work as Quality Assurance Manager in the video games industry. I started by breaking games for a living, these days it's mostly spreadsheets, bug databases and meetings.

I'm a library technician, I work in digitisation, mostly with original materials and manuscripts. I am in the middle of a degree to be a librarian and archivist.

I used to work in a bookstore and I miss it terribly, especially the employee discount!

Kate wrote: "I used to work in a bookstore and I miss it terribly, especially the employee discount! ."

I think I would have to make my furniture out of books if I worked in a book shop. I would buy way too many books than I could house!

Sincerely wrote: "School! ha ha, I have no idea what I want to do with my life."

I'm done with school but still don't know what I want to do with my life, lol. Hopefully you have better luck.
I just know that what I am doing now is definitely NOT it.

When I worked in a bookshop, I got a 70% discount... I made no money (but many books).

70%!!!!!! Here I was thinking I was doing okay getting 33%. :o

Thats an insane discount. I don't get any work discounts sadly :-(

It's fascinating to see what everyone does!

For my day job I work as a technical researcher/writer, writing about ships - technical, regulatory, safety and best practice kind of stuff. I fell into it by accident after biology degrees...

There's always something new to learn :-)

Vinca wrote: "It's fascinating to see what everyone does!

For my day job I work as a technical researcher/writer, writing about ships - technical, regulatory, safety and best practice kind of stuff. I fell into..."

To repeat one of my favorite quotes: "You have nothing more to learn five minutes after you're dead." ;)

I measure gamma-rays. I have yet to turn green, but I have actually used that detector array in the bad hulk movie. They don't shoot out, no no no no. Also, they filmed the latest star trek movie in front of a detector i worked on. My degrees of separation from hollywood are all mechanical, and radioactive, which I never thought about until now but how cool is that?

I thirty years work in a cement factory. It's not an easy job, but I get paid every month. My hobby is writing and drawing. Fortunately there was the Internet and allowed me to publish my first book. It is a little late, but never too late.

I'm a horticulturist by trade, but when I emigrated to New Zealand I didn't have a work permit until the legislation got changed a few years later, so I spent my time freelancing as an editor for an online magazine called useYourGarden that specialised in growing edible stuff. It was fun, but the website no longer exists (shame...).

Later I went to live in England, where I worked as a horticulturist again at first, but then got an office job as a bookkeeper's assistant for a private college, and replaced the bookkeeper within a few weeks when she left the college. I was soon responsible for all bookkeeping for 5 campuses in the UK. Then I was promoted to assistant manager and changed location to their campus in Belgium.

I'm now a certified bookkeeper and work for yet another private educational trust in Germany. I'm planning to become a fully certified accountant at some point in the future, but currently have no time to study for the exam (nor money to spend on the prep courses).

I have a side job as a bookkeeper for a property management company in the US, which I do from home in the evenings. I've also opened a small publishing company, so at least on the weekends I work in a book-related job :)

I work nights in a grocery store. It's a decent job, with very little customer interaction. And, since they shifted me over to the frozen section, I am also separate from the rest of the crew. This was never really my plan, but apparently my antisocial nature helped make me a good fit for the position.

ha ha! I know what you mean James. Sometimes work is so much nicer if I just talk to my computer ;-)

I work as a Machine Tool Technology CNC Instructor at a technical college. It's a lot of fun, cause when I'm not busy with students, I get to do research. I love to read so much that I enjoy getting to read about my job.

You all have such interesting jobs!!!

I am a biology student. Tomorrow I have my last exam (is it obvious I don't feel like studying??) and monday I start my own research (the influence of natural vegetation on polinator density in blue berry crops). I have worked in the food and beverage department of a zoo for 5 years every sat- and sunday and all holidays, but of some stupid law I have to take a 6 month break from that. I will start there again in July.

Everyone else is much more interesting than I am! I'm in billing for an oxygen supply company, which basically means deciphering paperwork and explaining customers' bills to them ("that line item on your invoice for oxygen means ... oxygen. For which we would like you to pay"). The bad news - besides the cubicle-dwelling paper-pusher part - is that my coworkers treat the place like a social club - about half of any given day it sounds like a bar at happy hour. The good news is that management's solution to helping me keep my sanity and filter out the loud conversations - about whether the c-word is a bad word (not that one, the other one), the frequency at which they have sex, and where they went for dinner last night - was to tell me to wear earphones. Yay audiobooks - I kind of DO get paid to read, in that today I could listen to The Fellowship of the Ring while entering invoices.

(Ooh! Now they're talking about the attractions of a career in prostitution! Where are my earbuds...)

I entertain a faint hope that at some point I might be able to create a side business (and while I'm dreaming make it a full-time job) giving people's manuscripts a critical read-through. I have one loyal author who is sending me her second book now (well, her third - the second one I'm reading, though). One fine day I'm going to put together a website and get to promoting myself.

I work as a part-time receptionist; answering the phone, reporting maintenance issues, occasionally cleaning up after everyone, occasionally work on an editing project (which I actually look forward to because then I actually have something to do), etc.

But! When I'm not working as a receptionist, I'm creating!

I LOVE to create - artsy fartsy stuff.

And, as a matter of fact, I'm starting my own business! Hooray!

My focus: printmaking! I love typography, I love the clean lines and design aspect of it; however, I also love to make mini illustrations. I think it's one of the few things I'm good at, so! I thought, why not combine them? Go all Shel Silverstein up in hur! Not really, of course, but I do think part of my inspiration for my work comes from his books.

I'm actually going to be opening up shop this weekend; Sunday, to be exact! So exciting! You can check me out here: www.zele-hickson.squarespace.com if you'd like!

But anyway, I'm really looking forward to getting more involved with the Goodreads community (discussion boards, following authors, reading challenges, etc.), and getting to know as many (if not all) of you as I can!

So good luck to you in all your endeavors, and I wish you every happiness. :-)

Z

Milou wrote: "You all have such interesting jobs!!!

I am a biology student. Tomorrow I have my last exam (is it obvious I don't feel like studying??) and monday I start my own research (the influence of natural..."

Good luck on your exam! If you haven't taken it already, but you probably have by now lol

If so, how do you think you did? :-)

That's so cool you'll be starting your own research soon. I bet that's exciting! "Polinator density," what does that mean exactly? And will you get to *ahem* "taste test" some of the blueberries?

Also, what does a member of the food and beverage department of a zoo do?

I honestly just sit a desk, twiddling my thumbs, waiting for the phone to ring Monday through Friday, so, understandably, your life is far more interesting than mine lol

Jason wrote: "I work as a Machine Tool Technology CNC Instructor at a technical college. It's a lot of fun, cause when I'm not busy with students, I get to do research. I love to read so much that I enjoy gettin..."

I'm so glad you love your job
It makes me happy :-)

Zele, congratulations on opening your shop! Always a plus that you're good at what you do and that you enjoy it. My father once told me it's more important to like what you do than to do what you like. I have had the privilege of doing several jobs which I was both good at and enjoyed doing. I haven't yet figured out if I was good at them because I enjoyed them or if I enjoyed them because I was good at them. I guess at this point it's moot. Once again, congratulations and good luck!

Zele, by the way I live in Sumter. I went to the CofC and my son is attending TTC right now. Funny how this group can be so global and yet you still can find someone from your own back yard!

Zele wrote: " I'm starting my own business! Hooray!"

Oooooooh, that is such an exciting thing to do! Congratulations and I wish you all the best and good luck!

I opened my own side-business a few months back, and was super-excited, too. Finally I get to be the boss of something, haha! I'm not making any money yet, but I still have my dayjob so that's okay.

Niles wrote: "Zele, by the way I live in Sumter. I went to the CofC and my son is attending TTC right now. Funny how this group can be so global and yet you still can find someone from your own back yard!"

Thank you Niles!

CofC is an awesome campus, and the professors there (some of them) are really quite accessible. I learned a great deal about American Indian culture, then and now, from Dr. Christophe Boucher, when I invited him out to speak during Diversity Day at my work. He was very passionate, engaging and friendly!

Nevertheless, I hope your son is doing well and is enjoying his time at TTC. What is he studying?

By the way, your story is amazing! I always enjoy hearing from our veterans; several members of my family being vets themselves - my Dad included - and I'm even more thrilled to hear you are well and enjoying your retirement with books. :-)

I guess that's what encouraged/inspired you to join Goodreads?

Zele wrote: "Milou wrote: "You all have such interesting jobs!!!

I am a biology student. Tomorrow I have my last exam (is it obvious I don't feel like studying??) and monday I start my own research (the influe..."

Congratulations with your shop Zele! I sounds awesome.

I have my exam only tonight (I live in Holland, its almost noon here now :p), so still have a few hours to wait. Fingers crossed.
And for my research I will look at if you plant strips of flowers next to the crop field, if that results in having more pollinators (such as bees and hoverflies) in the field (which leads to a better crop production). I hope I can do some 'taste tests' yes. But seeing as I only start monday I still have to plan everything.

It basically means I work in the restaurants and outlets. I loved it because it was such a diverse job. One day you're making pizza's and the next you're selling all kinds of fancy coffees or drive around the place to restock everything.

Tracey wrote: "Everyone else is much more interesting than I am! I'm in billing for an oxygen supply company, which basically means deciphering paperwork and explaining customers' bills to them ("that line item o..."

LOL; that's awesome. I need to better promote myself in copy editing and proofreading. You can fix manuscripts' content, and I'll fix the mechnanics, okay? Someday.