How did you get into this career?
My degree’s in biology, with an emphasis on marine biology. So right after college, I got to go work on Catalina Island off the coast of California at what’s called the Catalina Island Marine Institute. It’s kind of a science camp for kids.
Groups of school kids would come out there for half a week or a week, and we would take them snorkeling, we’d take them sea kayaking. We’d have various classes about different aspects of marine biology.
Photo by Lucy
How did you get into this job?
I’ve always thought about doing something of the like. Never really thought it would happen. But when I was working at the Montreal Children’s Hospital, I had a colleague who went for 6 months and came back, so I said, maybe it’s time to check it out. I applied to a few hospitals up north, because it’s not [the only] center that exists up north.
In the northern part of Canada, there are many other hospitals, because of the codes, the different bays. And because everything is so remote there are many different hospital settings.
So you had thought about working in the sort of rural atmosphere for a while.
Posted in How did I get here?
Tagged career journey, finding your passion in life, health, nursing, STEM
How did you find homeopathy? How did that become the thing that you wanted to do?
I went to college thinking that I was going to go to medical school. I wanted to be a doctor since I was five. And I got to college and I didn’t really like the pre-med program. I didn’t really like the competitiveness, I didn’t like chemistry (I wasn’t very good at it), and so I [became] a biology and economics major.
So then when I was pregnant with my first daughter, we had planned a home birth. When I was a kid, I was diagnosed with with allergies, but before that I had been on so many antibiotics because they didn’t know, and so, I was going to have this natural birth, but after she was born, what was I going to do? I don’t want to not have a medicated birth and then treat her with antibiotics when she gets her first cold. I started asking around, and I found (from a friend of a friend or something like that) a homeopath in Minneapolis. It turned out that he was the dean of this school.
Long story short, my daughter got an ear infection. I called our homeopath, and I said, “should I go to the doctor and get a prescription just in case?” and he said, no, if it works it’ll work faster than the antibiotics would. I gave it to her, and within two hours her ear was no longer red and she was fine. Continue reading
Image from Surviving the World by Dante Shepherd
How did you get into this career?
I kind of fell into the job as a result of having had the primary experience. What I mean is that I’d been a teacher, so I knew what the classroom was like, and I’d been in the research and development side of education in the non-profit business. When someone offered me a consulting opportunity, I took them up on it.
What advice would you have for someone who wanted to get a job like yours?
I will use the advice that someone gave me and I ignored. I would say, get a PhD in science education. Continue reading
How did you get into this? How did you decide that a distillery was the thing that you wanted to do?
I always joke that when I worked at Hewlett Packard for 12 years it drove me to drink, and that’s only a partially a joke. When I was a kid, my mom was always making wine, and would let me make wine, too. At the time, I thought it was absolutely a horrible tasting stuff, but it was still fun to make. And as I was first getting into engineering back in the early ‘90s, craft brewing was just starting to take off, but I was going a different direction in my career at that point. But when I was to the point when I was tired of doing the corporate/professional engineering life, I found that craft distillery was starting to take off out in Portland, Oregon where I had been visiting a lot for work. That put a bug in my head that this was a new field. This is kind of where craft brewing was back in the early ‘90s. You could still get into it – still small, and have a chance to be in on an emerging industry, not trying to get in on a pretty well-developed industry like craft brewing, where it now takes a lot more money and a lot more backing and that sort of thing.
Is there anything that you wish you had done differently?
That’s a really interesting question. There are a lot of things that, if I was doing this again, I definitely would not do. On the other hand, I look at all those experiences and I think well, if I hadn’t done that, there are all these things I wouldn’t have learned. So I can’t look at anything and say. “oh, no, that was a horrible glaring error,” but there are things that, if I had all the knowledge I have now, I would have made different choices. But nothing too bad.
A good example is that we just signed a contract with a distributor today to do all of our sales and distribution in Northern Colorado. I wish I had done that a year ago. But I had to come to that point [after] trying to do so in-house ourselves [before] I could really see the value of the distributor. And if I hadn’t gone through that pain, I wouldn’t have learned a lot of things about doing sales, and I wouldn’t have learned how to work with the distributor as well as we’ll know how to do now. So, it’s good and it’s bad. Probably have more money now if I’d done that sooner, but we’d be missing knowledge.
What advice would you have for someone who wants to follow in your footsteps?
Just I think it’s the same thing every entrepreneur says. If you knew how hard it was, would you ever do it? People just need to make sure that they’re prepared for it to be harder and take longer than whatever they’re planning. If you think you’re going to need enough money to live for a year, make sure it’s two. Because things – if you’re lucky maybe you’ll rise above those clouds, but there are so many pieces of it that it’s hard to be lucky on everything all the time. So it’s better to be over-prepared than under-prepared.
Posted in How did I get here?
Tagged career journey, distillery, independent business, small business owner, vodka
Here is part two of my interview with Eric, a recording studio producer. I have to say, this is my personal dream job. Maybe someday…
So how did you get into this career?
I was incredibly fortunate. It was really good timing. Sort of random, but sort of not. When I moved back from Germany, I started managing my friend’s band. And they ended up recording an album here. The album took 9 months to mix. I was just here all the time. And, at that time, I had my own little marketing and design agency with [a friend]. The owner here was looking for somebody to come on board and sort of be his right-hand guy.
We just hit it off. He brought me on sort of as a contract, temporary sort of thing. And it just worked out really, really well. If there’s a lesson to be learned from how I got this job, it’s that I was doing something that I really wanted to do but didn’t necessarily see a career in. I never imagined myself even in the music industry at all, let alone – I mean, I’d always been interested in audio stuff, for sure, and that’s what I always thought I was going to go into was radio. But I was managing the band because I wanted to do that, and I was fortunately in a financially comfortable position where I didn’t have to worry about making a living at it. I was just doing it. And everything just sort of fell into place.
How did you get into this career?
I definitely was a child of people who were quite socially active and socially conscious. I grew up going to all kinds of rallies and things with my mom, and my grandma, and my dad majored in Black Studies in the 1950s when it was pretty much unheard of. So, I grew up in a fairly socially conscious household.
For me, it was always about, not do I enjoy what I do, like editing facilitator guides in a quiet room, but I enjoy the fact that it is part of a social change. So, when it came to “what I want to be when I grow up,” in college I chose an interdisciplinary degree, so I was a liberal arts major, which contributed to my ability to write and think critically and analyze issues, and I volunteered.
One thing that is quite important that people can sell short is that volunteering can absolutely be a pathway to work. You get exposed to an organization and you get exposed to developing skills and knowledge.
Posted in How did I get here?
Tagged career journey, finding your passion in life, internship, non-profit
This is part two of my interview with Christie, who is a freelance science writer for publications such as Health, Smithsonian, and Slate.
How did you get into this career?
I always thought I was going to become a scientist. Right after college I wasn’t quite ready for grad school, so I did some research jobs, and then I started thinking about actually applying for a Ph.D. program, and the problem was that I couldn’t – when you apply for a Ph.D. program it is really specific. Some project, or some little thing. And I just couldn’t do that. It just shows that I am a generalist, and the thought of studying one little thing for five years, or something, just did not appeal to me. So, I kind of bounced around to a few different research jobs, in part because I thought, “well, maybe I’ll try this other thing; maybe that will be the thing that will really captivate me and be the thing that I want to do my Ph.D. in.” It just didn’t happen. I was still really interested in science, but the things I liked about it were talking about science and speaking about it. I actually realized that I didn’t enjoy doing it so much, like, the actual data collection can be really tedious and not that interesting.
Ken directing at Lollapalooza – photo by Lollapalooza
Ken directs live music for such events as Coachella and Lollapalooza. His interview is one of the first that I did, and it incorporates both the Who Do You Want To Be Today and How Did I Get Here information. That’s handy, because I will be on vacation for the Sept. 12 post. I will return with a new post on Sept. 19.
How would you describe what you do?
I would describe it like I’m a painter. The cameras are my palette and the music is my inspiration, and I’m painting. Because I don’t shoot stuff with the idea that …I direct it based on the band and the music and the moment. So much concert video you see out there looks the same. To be honest with you, it looks like sports coverage. (Most people directing concert videos) don’t understand song structure. They have to have an assistant director sitting next to them saying, “okay, the chorus is coming up…there’s a guitar solo coming up.” I take pride in the fact that each of the shows I’ve directed doesn’t look like anything else.
This is part two of my interview with Rachel, about her journey to leaving her career to become a small business owner.
How did you get into this career?
I was teaching Latin to first-through-eighth graders. I have a Master’s in Classics, and I wanted to be a Latin teacher, and I taught Latin for a year. I finished one year of teaching, and I came back to the same school, and I basically had a nervous breakdown, and I just couldn’t take the stress and the overwhelm anymore. They were just piling and piling more and more tasks and duties on me as a second-year teacher. I was the main Middle School Academy leader and I was overwhelmed. I kind of had a nervous breakdown and went in and talked to my Principal and said, “I can’t do this job anymore.” I went and saw my doctor because I was suicidal and she wrote me a note saying, “I think Rachel should just work part-time,” and I took it to my principal and said, “look, you can fire me, but I can’t keep doing what I’ve been doing.” He agreed, and so I worked part-time, and right at that same moment – actually, the day that I was having my nervous breakdown I didn’t go to work. I called in sick, and I was hanging out with a good friend of mine and she said she was going to a yoga class that afternoon. I never, ever had any time to do anything for myself because I was working full-time and I was a single-parent, [but[ I could actually go to this yoga class, so I went, and it literally changed my life.
