Shite careers advice from adults...

Asshole financial planner uncle, upon hearing I was doing a BA: "Well, just get an MBA after that and you'll be all set."

Also that was at my grandfather's wake

A couple of years ago when I told my great-uncle that I was thinking of pursuing a career in EU politics, he said "Oh yes, I expect there is a great demand for secretaries". Authentic careers advice from the 1950s.

My high school careers adviser told me that if you have a languages degree you can do absolutely anything. Ha!

Mine told me that any degree at all from a "good" (i.e. old) university would get you a job wherever you wanted. Um, WRONG.

Anyone who tells you "Just do something you love," without adding "AND WORK REALLY REALLY FUCKING HARD AT IT BECAUSE IT'S GOING TO BE WAY MORE COMPETITIVE THAN THE JOBS YOU DON'T LIKE" should be sued for negligence.

I am downright tired of people telling me I should be a model

"You should become a teacher because then you'd have the exact same schedule as your children!" – My mom

Hurting sadly OTM in that way.

My dad became an accountant in '84 bcz everyone was like "All the accountants will wane into retirement soon and a grand new era of accounting will dawn! My god you must become an accountant." And that worked for about three years but apparently everyone had taken that advice, so since then he's been accounting on and off, when he can and isn't getting downsized, but has mostly worked roofing houses. So his sensible advice is "Don't become an accountant."

He explicates this point with a lot of vitriol.

College to our parents who didn't go is like some Masonic ritual after which jobs and opportunities will open up to the graduate in similar fashion. My mom was more realistic and called my degree 'a permission slip to interview for jobs'.

That's where the levelheadedness stops. Jobs my mother has suggested for me in all seriousness, ranging from the batshit insane to the sublime: children's book author, location supervisor, news reporter, oncologist, news presenter, stockbroker, forensic scientist, game show contestant, game show question compiler, 'write a book on elderly abuse', board game designer, commercial artist and her perennial 'a beautiful job in advertising'. Never mentioned the secretarial pool once...

Anyone who tells you "Just do something you love," without adding "AND WORK REALLY REALLY FUCKING HARD AT IT BECAUSE IT'S GOING TO BE WAY MORE COMPETITIVE THAN THE JOBS YOU DON'T LIKE" should be sued for negligence.

As a corollary to this, if you do something you really care about, you're going to be about a hundred times better at it than you would be at something you don't care about.

'write a book on elderly abuse', board game designer, commercial artist

Oh man I need to devise a way to combine these three.

My aptitude test told me I would be a good priest or game show host!

I need to find a way to combine those two as well.

The aesthetically pleasing religious game show (based on my board game about elderly abuse).

The prizes are all varying levels of indulgences and relics.

Get Merv Griffin to do a bitching theme for the pipe organ.

My mom always tells my 7 y/o niece to become an optometrist because "with the way people use computers these days everyone will be nearly blind in 10 years!”
I don't think she realizes this dream vocation hardly compares to my niece's next-level conviction that she is the divinely chosen successor to the throne of Hanna Montana.

"You should become a teacher because then you'd have the exact same schedule as your children!" – My mom

-- Abbott, Monday, May 19, 2008 2:03 PM (17 minutes ago) Bookmark Link

this is actually pretty good advice if yr happy to be poor.

"You can do anything with an English degree!!!" should've been followed with the caveat "... if you graduate from the Ivy League. Otherwise you're temping for life, baby."

I think this modern NCLB world would eviscerate me as a teacher, what with my ways and all.

Not exactly career advice, but anyhow, I was working this one job in high school, and I jerkily quit without giving two-weeks' notice. My boss at the time (a post-middle-aged guy with a couple of kids), did some-slow burn thing when I delivered the news to him, and finished our conversation by staring me down and saying, "You know what you're going to amount to in life? NOTHING. Absolutely NOTHING. You're going to be a big ZERO! NADA, ZERO!"

wtf, I was all of sixteen years-old at the time, supercreep.

Anybody do a careers test at school called JIGCAL? Jobs Ideas Generator - Careers something something? A multiple choice questionnaire that you'd fill in the circles with an HB pencil, and then they'd get sent away to be graded by a mainframe computer, then a couple of weeks later you'd get a summary back. Really obvious stupid advice, like if for the question "do you like working outdoors" you'd filled in the circle corresponding to "no absolutely not", the summary report would suggest that you didn't become a gardener.

haaaa i wish someone had told me to go to school for finance or accounting. not that i would have listened at the time. but at least now they could rub it in my face.

Dell, I've had that shit happen in life, too, and I want to mail those people my resumé and photos of me being awesome and blurbs from people I know all ending with, "...so fuck off."

Of course, the good people I want to write and thank all DIED before I could. :(

My shite career advice to kids now would be, "go into science or banking. Being a writer is stupid. If you need to be creative go visual; people actually care about that stuff."

Of course, the good people I want to write and thank all DIED before I could. :(

Bah to that...

Ha, also, I got dragged to some "psychic" several years back, who kept insisting that I should/would be a "writer". For most of the session I was dropping hints to her that she had chosen the wrong career as "psychic", based on how the reading was progressing.

But then again, by "writer" maybe she meant a person who will go to any lengths to procrastinate, including posting non sequiturs and pointless anecdotes on an internet message board, in-between harassing friends with unsolicited rambling emails. By that definition, I am a screaming success.

Guys, do what you love, and you'll never have to work a day in your life, unless you need to eat.

But I love eating!

be a restaurant critic for a newspaper!

I have enough money to last the rest of my life, unless I buy something. (Jackie Mason)

Get a cooking show on TV then!

"Boldness has genius, magic and power in it." Goethe said that! xxp

Can I run a Goethe themed game show with cooking and indulgences about elderly-people abuse? Everytime I go to state job service, there is never a job posting for such a thing. (Nor for 'heiress,' dammit.)

i wish i could do undergraduate over again. if only i had just majored in something useful, then now, at 29 i could go back and take the fun classes.

This new economy thing sucks. They're even outsourcing writing and editing jobs now!!!!!! No wonder everyone's flooding into professional school these days.

(xxpost) Try reviving this guy's show:
http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/6/61/Larry_Grayson_on_Generation_Game.jpg
Larry Grayson's Generation Game, although it's more Kafka than Goethe. (unfortunate picture, Grayson didn't look like Tiny Tim really)

Dell, any non-parental adult who trash-talks a minor in their employment deserves whatever disrespectful retort anyone can level at them. I'd have asked the guy a) what he was driving and b) if he was only trying to make sure you didn't wind up as pathetic as him.

Worst thing ever: had evil telesales job hassling people for Time-Life books for about three weeks and got seriously disturbed by the way manager would announce X HAS LOST THEIR TIME-LIFE VIRGINITY whenever someone sold their first book. High turnover, as with all '80s punker jobs, so we heard this five times every day, from an unattractive man in charge of a lot of women. Finally I snapped and got sacked for 'having a bad attitude' about this so I decided to make him uncomfortable by keeping my side of the dialogue loud: "WHAT ATTITUDE AM I SUPPOSED TO HAVE ABOUT LISTENING TO AN IDIOT COMPARE EVERYTHING TO SEX ALL DAY?"