FROM FIONA: Your reply cordially requested

[pegkerr]

Tomorrow, as part of Take Our Daughters and Sons to Work, Fiona is going to be visiting Rob's store and spending the day with him, learning about his job. The last two years, she has spent this day with me at my office, learning about my job.

I'd like her to give her the chance to learn about a lot of jobs. Specifically, your job.

Won't you tell Fiona about your job, so she can get an idea of the vast possibilities in the World of Work out there?

If you can, please leave Fiona a comment by tomorrow night, telling her about your career. Something like:

What your job title is, and what that means

A description of a typical day

What you need in the way of training/education/experience to do this job

Why you like it and (if you dare)

Why you dislike it

What sorts of things can go wrong at your job?

What kind of person thrives in your job

Anything else you can think of that would give her an idea of what it might be like to choose your career?

I'd like her to get as many replies as possible. Thanks ever so much!

Cheers,
Peg (and Fiona)

Comments

[brooksmoses]

(continuation)

and (if you dare) Why you dislike it

Sometimes, the freedom can be a problem. I'm slowly learning to be better about scheduling my time, but I do have weeks where I don't get much done, and weeks where I have to work long hours to make up for it.

Also, even though these results will eventually change the world (a very little bit), right now they're just interesting to me. That means that, until I get finished and get things written up and tell people about them, there's nobody to say, "Here, I need this! Please finish it!" So I have to be completely self-motivated.

What sorts of things can go wrong at your job?

Lots of little things, mostly. Writing large computer programs is a deceptive task, like climbing a large mountain. It doesn't look that big when you start, but when you get to where you think you ought to be finished, there's still more to go. Most of that's debugging; sometimes there's a typo, sometimes the idea you had about how to write the program just didn't work out and you have to change the ideas and start over.

Actually, that's a sort of large picture of what can go wrong. People doing research often remind themselves that research means that you ask questions, and look for the answer, without knowing what the answer is. Sometimes the answer is that it wasn't a very interesting question; sometimes the answer is that it's not an answerable question. So it's possible to spend a lot of effort and find out something not worth the time.

A lot of the time, though, the answer is a combination of an answer and a half-dozen more unanswered questions. This means things have gone very well indeed.

On a different level, one of the things that can go wrong is that a doctoral degree isn't something that takes a set number of years; instead, you work until you've finished a piece of research and answered a good-sized question, and sometimes the question that you start out working on turns out to be bigger than you thought. And so it can take longer than you expected before you get done. (Sometimes you have to make the question smaller or change it.)

What kind of person thrives in your job

Someone who is very curious, and can be self-motivated about pursuing that curiousity. Also, someone who is reasonably good at mathematics and (in my case) computer programming. And someone who enjoys putting together things and making them work just for the challenge of it.

Anything else you can think of that would give her an idea of what it might be like to choose your career?

Well, this isn't quite a career yet -- graduate school lasts for five years or so, and then you have to go out into the real world and find a new job. I haven't quite started doing that, so I don't know what it's like yet!

I think I've put most of what I know to say about it in the other answers, so I guess I'll close here.