battsup

Well next year is my senior year and i need to start making some decisions(ya i know that they should have already been made). I need a high paying job where I would have time to work on my cars. I plan on having a car collection of 14 or more. I have the grades to pull anything i want off but i need some direction. I was thinking:

family doctor
accountant
electrical engineer

tell me what you think i have an open mind

yellow 72

I can offer this advise, forget door to door gynocology :rolleyes: seemed like a good idea at the time....

tnt76vette

If you are as good as you say you are, why are you asking us "knuckle busters"? The world is your oyster Kid......ENJOY :D

Shark Racer

Paid internships in computer engineering make much bank. Accountants make good money too. I'd skip on the doctor thing personally.

I'm second year @ SCU in computer engineering.

-Steve

Pedro'74

I think the most important is to find something you like to do. If you like what you do and is good at it, money will probably come as a consequence.

I'm a professor of mathematics, but I travelled on many roads to find what I wanted: played bass professionaly, studied mining engineering, and finally found math. It's not a career that will make me rich, but it has many nice points: stability, good benefits, the ability to work wherever I want and any time I want (except for when I'm teaching--but that's just 6 hours/week, 9 months/year), and the pleasure to discover new things and transmit knowledge to the students.

Good luck in whatever career you choose!

:cheers:
-Pedro


[Modified by Pedro'74, 12:34 AM 1/25/2003]

Smokehouse69

Let me speak from 30+ years of professional work experience,
#1 You won't make enough money as a family practitioner to support a 14 car collection.
#2 You won't make enough money as an electrical engineer to support a 14 car collection.
#3 You can make enough money to support a 14 car collection if you become an accountant.....for Enron! :D
Truthfully I can't give you any practical advice but to tell you that what seems like a good idea at 18, doesn't seem so good at 22. My son wanted to be a physician, he had the grades and went to a private university that had an extremely high rate of acceptance to med school. By the time he graduated he hated the idea of going to medical school.
He got a job working as a computer specialist (his hobby all the way through high school and college) got a second bachelors degree in CS, got every certification he could sign up to test for, and is working on his MBA. He is 27 and is drawing a 6 figure salary.
The point of this story is to get a degree that will give you a strong science and technology background, then find a job doing something you like to do, are good at and won't drive you crazy!

74FLCONV

My best friend is an ENT surgeon. He started pre-med @ 18. He's now 36 and just starting to make "doctor" money (eighteen years of medical school, internships & specialty training). Now, with all the malpractice insurance BS going on here in FLA, he's contemplating leaving the biz or leaving FLA.

Don't become a doctor for the money...

I'm self-employed...build computer networks for a living. It's not making me rich (real estate will do that), but I can take off when I want and still have a few $$$ leftover for hobbies.

Go to college and become an expert at something. The Benjamins will follow.

D. Ocean
Miami, FLA

Corey_68

I'm a professional student by day and gigolo by night.

Not earning six figures, but happy :cheers:

Captain_Kaboom

Simple!

Consulting!

No hard labor, you don't really have to do any work, just pick one specific topic that no one really knows much about but a lot of people need, read and learn, and then spit it back out for $$$. Think of it like college- but getting paid for it instead!

Yeah, you don't really wind up doing anything productive with your life, but what the heck- what was I gonna do anyway? Except raise a family and drive vettes, I mean....

ORVette

I'm 34, and I'm a city bus driver making about 35K a year, a little more if I work some OT once in a while, but not much more.

I'm back in school! $18/hr is not as much as it sounded like when I started.

Looking back, it seems like a good idea would be to go to ROTC, enter the armed services as an officer, put in your 20 years or so, and retire a little past 40 with a full pension and your whole life pretty much still ahead of you. Full benefits too. I can't speak from experience, but this seems like a cool deal. Good luck!

SanDiegoPaul

I'm a service writer/manager for the Dyno Shop (www.thedynoshop.com)

Not making the bank I made when I was in the computer business ... but I am workiing 8 to 5 now M-F instead of 9 to 7 six days. And I have benefits too! :cheers:

Stevo81

This is from a chiropractor who was an ironworker, school bus driver, hardware store clerk, junkyard disassembler, transmission rebuilder etc, etc.
No matter what you go into, you will be in a BUSINESS!!! Take at least basic business courses ...salesmanship, negotiation, problem solving,
People open restaurants because they like to cook !!! oops

Crash Dummy

Just a wild guess, but you are a senior in high school and not a senior in college making these choices. Obviously... none of the above would be happening if you waited that late in the college curriculum to make that decision.

Believe it or not you will be stuck with alot of work out of college no matter how brilliant you are. You have to prove yourself or be independent of others before you can have the latitude to do what you want. All of us want what you are looking for. Very few find it.

At all costs stay out of the energy sector unless you go to work for an oil company. The best engineering degree is not electrical.... mechanical. Accounting? I work with financials every day... it's not what anyone with your aspirations would like to do since you are dependent on others to feed you information that you have to make sense out of. See the post above about Enron. They got caught up in a huge scandal... everyone else just tones it down so that they can get away with it longer. No corporation posts *actual* results. You are an idiot if you believe that. Accounting depends on too many crooked people looking to make their numbers... I'd bypass it.

Good luck!

Simul8

If I could do it all over, I would have become an Airline Pilot. With one of the majors, 75 hours/month work schedule. Plenty of free time, and see the world. You would need to start with a commuter first or military.

Jughead

I can't complain about my career choice. I came from the inner city, worked hard in school and had to apply to a private school to get a decent high school education. I avoided all the low-life's & druggies that I lived around. I persevered and went on to Pharmacy School. While my old buddies were getting high & overdosing, I was running track & cross country. When I wasn't doing that, I was in the library.

Pharmacy has served me well. My only complaint is that your salary starts out higher than other careers but doesn't accelerate as some others. If I had a law degree or MBA and my years of experience, I'd be a partner and making 100,000+.

Len

PatsLs1vette

I agree with lenny,pharmacist :yesnod: thats where you want to be,a friend of mine owns three family style pharmacys and hes 27 now,and has 3 pharmacist working for him also and he pays them 75,000 starting.My wife works for him as a pharmacy tech.,and he pays her a good sum also.but now its 6 years of school otherwise my wife wouldve did it(she knows more then the new pharmacist that come in there).Hey Len,did you have to know animals also.

HawkIVette

I don't know what to tell you "to be when you grow up", just what NOT to be.

Don't be a Fireman.

56 hours a week
13. 60 / hr
and a @&#%!*$# Mayor for a boss who is constantly threatening to lay us off work. Just this week, he unveiled his plan to lay off 6 Police officers and 3 Firefighters in our community ( city of about 27,000 population).

Sorry just had to vent.

Defineately go to college and get a real job.

Gotta Fix my '76

Battsup,
There are soo many questions for you to answer yourself, that, if your in high school your not ready to answer but maybe your are. Right now you can pick your school, job, friends, nose, car, you can't pick...Where will I be in 10 years. Shoot, I can honestly say that probably no one on this forum could say they know where'd they be in 10 years completely. But their are some basic questions you can answer like, do you like working with people? Do you like being in control? Are you a very detailed person? Is it your way or the high way? Do you have any leadership skills? or what skills do you have yet? And yes you do get skills by going to high school...Like discipline, committment, social and behavioral skills. Some identity skills.

I can tell you one important thing..Don't go do something just to please your parents or because it's expected of you...You will regret it!! Do something you enjoy...even if it's on the side at first (like making music) then see if it can support your lifestyle and "plan" out as best you can how your going to get there. I have faith in ya!

Me personally...I'm 23 still working on stuff. I am a full time student in night school at a local community college and university. I also work full time and have also been blessed to have gotten into a small medical company 4 years ago, that is now grossing 230 million dollars. I was the 75 person their and now their is 350. I am now in a position of interest (that I had to work for) in the Training Department. I get to Design training programs that teach people: how to be a better team, how to be a more effective leader and speaker, I do management training along with customer service training. I am basically a corporate trainer and I love it...It allows me creative freedom to come up and implement ideas and I have alot of atonomy and I can apply my interest to what I do.

And remember that Work is a means to the end, it's not the End in itself...

What I do outside of work is really what makes me work harder. I am in a band and play guitar & Drums & Vocals, I lead music at a local church, I am activly involved in about 40 high school kids lives (thats what matters to me), I kayak, soccer, surf, run, bike, WORK ON THE CAR!!, and enjoy life..which is really what work is all about...so don't get into something that won't allow you to enjoy your time off...

Good luck, and happy hunting.

:cheers:

Jughead

Don't know if I'd go the retail path Pat. It's very tough unless you've got a GREAT location & no competition. Most of the retail guys around here are out of business. 3rd parties did them in. :sad:

Your probably right in the fact that your wife may know more than a lot of the recent grads.....heck they quit teaching them Pharmaceutical math in schools and now are teaching the kids that their jobs will be as consultants! :lol: :lolg: That may come in about 20+ years or so. There are consulting jobs available but they are few and far between. We have students coming thru the two hospitals in which I work and all they are interested in doing is looking things up, surfing online & writting reports! :lol: There's not a lot of need for that in present day Pharmacy though.
You'd be surprised at how many phone calls I get at work from recent grads working at other institutions who don't know basic Pharmacy work and have absolutely no grasp of drug indication or mechanism of action----and they want to be called Doctor! :lolg: :lolg: They're forgetting that the primary requisite for that is a MD or Phd after their name. Other than that they're just Bubba the pharmacist to me! :lolg: :rant: :yawn:
Maybe I'm just getting old, grumpy and inpatient.

Oh, to answer your question, we only did animals in Biology & briefly in one of the Pharmaceutical labs.

chuck d

Don't become a Airline Mechanic, nights, weekends,holidays, pay and benefits going down and with all this lots of responsibilty. If I had to do over I would be a plumber, try and find one of them when you need one.

Chuck D


[Modified by chuck d, 12:27 PM 1/26/2003]