Why Me, Why Now, Why Here?
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My uncle is a mechanical engineer and has been for almost 30 years. Him, his wife, and their two children live in a nice house, in a nice neighborhood, in a very nice suburb of Boston. I lived with them for 3 months on my first pre-graduate work assignment away from school. I didn’t think much of it at the time, but something my aunt said to me has never really left my consciousness.
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She of course was referring to my uncle’s career. At the time I thought, “So what? ‘Comfortable’ is good enough for me.”
I was, and continue to be, a little naïve about certain things.
Here I was a 21-year-old kid on his first engineering job for less than 3 months and had no reservations about the profession I was about to enter for the next 40-45 years. After all, why should I? I was an ENGINEER!
And then I had my first encounter with what I like to call “the itch.”
“The Itch” in this case, manifested itself in an intense desire to finish my internship and return back to college. Before I had finished a mere 13 weeks of work, I was ready to be finished.
This should have been a bit of a warning sign. But I had thought that it was an artifact of being on the quarter system in college. I was used to completely changing my schedule and classes every 13 weeks.
10 weeks of classes, 1 week of finals, 2 weeks off. Rinse, lather, repeat.
A thirteen week internship was just another block of time.
I liked that job. I really LIKED that job. It was interesting, I worked with cool people, and the corporate culture was amazing. I returned to that company for another 13 week block. This time I didn’t live with my family. Life in suburbia was just a little too surreal - almost like the future was laid out right in front of me.
Same thing happened, even earlier in the internship this time.
I was doing something completely different in this job. This time I rationalized it by assuming that this type of job just wasn’t for me.
The next job was different. It was always something new and challenging. This internship lasted 7 months and I decided it was the job for me. I returned to college to finish up my Master’s degree.
The whole time I was gone, I had idealized this job. I built the whole thing up in my head. Now, don’t get me wrong. It’s a really good job. But what I finally realized is that it wasn’t the specific job creating “the itch.” It was the fact that I had a job, period.
Once the learning phase is over, any job will become ordinary. Maybe I’ve got a bit too much mathematician in me. After all, what’s the point in actually going through the motions and SOLVING a problem after you’ve already figured out HOW to do it.
The hard part is over. Leave the grunt work to someone else.
Companies don’t think like this though. You have a “training” period and then you’re expected to be able to repeat that task over and over again 40 hours a week for 40 years.
So after a couple of months on my full-time job, I was looking into getting a second Master’s degree or a Ph.D. Retreating into what is familiar is a perfectly normal response to a frustrating situation.
Now don’t get me wrong. I do my job and I do it well. And there are some people that would be envious of my position. But I’ve realized that in the long run, this isn’t for me. Changing to another job or another company will only delay the inevitable.
I will get bored. I will be unsatisfied.
So here I am striking out in a new field for me - Internet Marketing. I have no professional credits or education. But I WILL make it work.