For those of you in college trying to figure out what you want to do with your life, here is a little advice. Don't choose your career based on the school placement office statistics for starting salaries. That is the trap I fell into a long time ago. You've got to pick some type of major so it might as well be one that makes a lot of money...right?
Back in 1988 I thought I wanted to be a doctor (actually, I think it was my parents that wanted me to be a doctor). Not sure how I'd ever be a doctor when I practically pass out at the sight of blood. Lord help me when I need to give blood for something. So I picked biology as my major as part of the pre-med program at MU. After the first year, though, I realized biology wasn't my thing so I switched to chemistry as my major. I was pretty good at chemistry in high school. But it didn't take much longer before it was clear to me that there was no way I was going to go to school for the rest of my life and be up to my ears in debt. Starting salaries for chemists back then were around 25-30k I believe and this just wasn't going to cut it. So I went to the placement office and pulled the chart of starting salaries based on career. Back in my days you couldn't just jump on the internet. The top starting salaries went to Chemical Engineers (around 55k I think). That sounded pretty good to me considering I was lucky to be able to scrounge enough money up to eat at Taco Bell.
So off I went pursing my degree in chemical engineering. It was hard but interesting. I liked math, chemistry and solving problems. Luckily, it would only take me an extra year of college to complete the degree. Not long after I graduated, I landed a job preparing safety analysis reports on various Department of Energy (DOE) facilities in Oak Ridge, TN. I started learning about radioactive waste and trying to analyze what the heck happens if there is a release. But after six years of doing this type of work, I found I just couldn't take it anymore. It didn't matter what it paid. I was sick to my stomach going out to Y-12 every day. The kind of experience I was getting didn't seem much good for anything outside of DOE. I had to find something else that I could make a living doing. I'd spent five years in college and six years developing a career and was ready to throw it all away. My parents thought I was nuts especially when it was most of their money that put me through college.
There was this thing called the Internet and people were starting to go nuts over it in the stock market. I had a co-worker who took a class or two in VB and landed a job as a lead developer for some small company. So I thought I'd try some classes myself at Pellissippi State Technical Community College. Who would have thought that programming would be my calling. I had one programming class at MU which was Pascal and I made a C (barely). I couldn't stand the class and thought "how do people stand to do this stuff."
But maybe that C in Pascal actually had meaning because the base language at PSTCC was...C.
(more later)
