Cool Jobs

[mmcirvin]

Timothy Burke lists the ways to get a Cool Job, and notes that there always seems to be an impossible-to-duplicate element of luck in them.

My path to my first real Cool Job was a little bit of his Route 3 and a little Route 4, but not exactly either—I don't feel as if it really took as much initiative as he implies. It would go a little something like this:

In your final year of high school, make a chance connection at a county science fair that gets you a Cool but very-low-paid college summer job at a research institution. Build highly specialized technical experience there, then detour into a largely unrelated academic PhD program and slave away there for seven years. Then come out with your degree, and, after a summer of increasing desperation looking for a non-Cool Job, just happen to find somebody who needs the specific kind of expertise you got in that old summer job.

Now, there are a lot of elements in the above that weren't chance events in themselves, but consequences of social and economic privilege. I could, for instance, actually go do a summer job in which I got rent plus a tiny stipend, because I wasn't relying on making enough money to pay my way through college or help support my family. I had good people behind me in the science-fair racket (energetic parents and a sympathetic eighth-grade science teacher who'd kept in touch), providing encouragement and sometimes equipment when necessary. I could afford a personal computer in the 1980s. And so on. All those things actually conspired to put me in situations in which opportunities were more likely to present themselves at random, and then I just had to pick the right ones and jump.

Even the final appearance of the Cool Job at the end of my summer of unemployment happened in part because I had no academic debt due to a parallel combination of lucky accidents, accidentally shrewd judgments and privilege, so it took several months for the wolf to really scratch at the door, and I could afford to bide my time going to job fairs and looking for something really good.

So in a way it's like advice for the lovelorn: while I've been fairly successful, I don't know how to tell anyone else to do what I did.

Comments

[mmcirvin.livejournal.com]

...I suppose you could also call the time in the academic world my dues-paying period, though really a lot of it was of zero relevance to my professional career (except for some of the mathematics).

That said, it does impress people when you come in with a doctoral degree even if that degree is completely irrelevant. The other side of the coin is that some employers might worry that you're overqualified for joe jobs, but I didn't really encounter a lot of that.

[mmcirvin.livejournal.com]

...Also, he's talking about humanities majors, who may have it a lot tougher than us science types.

[thette.livejournal.com]

The really cool job I've had for a year, I got through a summer research school I had the opportunity to attend. Same thing as for you: I could afford to spend a summer making very little, because I had a boyfriend I was living with.

(I spent that year travelling around the country reading medical birth records. It was fun, I made enough money to pay for our wedding, but I couldn't ever do it again.)