Tag Archives: dream job

Who do you want to be? Pat, middle school science teacher

Posted on February 20, 2013 | 1 Comment

What is your actual title?

Well, I guess my official title is just teacher. Licensed teacher.

Tell me a little bit about your job. What do you do in a typical day?

My job is multi-faceted in many ways.  Typically, I teach five classes. Three middle – 7th grade general science. It’s mostly life science. And then I teach one advanced math class and one marine biology class. 

Most of my day is spent in actual instruction time, with the kids and in the classroom. I have my math class first – first class of the day. Then I have three science classes in a row. And then my marine biology class at the end of the day. Then I have one class period of planning time. What goes on during the class, there’s all kinds of different things. I mean there’s what you would consider instruction time, where the science class – we’re generally doing some kind of hands-on activity and analyzing that activity and getting results from that activity, and going over some of the vocabulary we learned in that activity. And maybe setting up what we’re going to be doing the next day, to build on it.

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Who do you want to be? Lucy, nurse

Posted on February 6, 2013 | Leave a comment
May to June 2012 041

Puvirnituq from the air. Photo by Lucy Shum

What is your actual title?

I’m a nurse.

Okay.

I’m a nurse at Puvirnituq.  That is a small village of about 2000 people. And it’s located above the 55th parallel. It’s part of Nunavik, which is a Native First Nation Territory, but it hasn’t started having its own government – governing body, so we’re still under the Quebec Province of Canada.

Tell me a little about what you do there – your day-to-day work.

Well, there are three types of nursing in Puvirnituq. I actually started off in the hospital. There’s also the clinic – dispensary, which I’ve also just started.  I will focus more on the hospital nursing job, because I’ve been doing it for over a year and a half.

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Best advice of 2012

Posted on January 2, 2013 | Leave a comment

Here are some of the best bits of advice from my 2012 interviews:

The actual  work of a profession is rarely like the schoolwork of it, which I think is really hard for students to understand…  Jennifer, Paparazzi

Find a school that works for you.  Attend a few lectures to just start learning a little bit before you jump in and see if that’s what you actually want to do.  Go see [someone in the profession you are interested in].  Go see if what they did in that hour is something that you would want to do.  - Jen, Holistic nutritionist

I spent a lot of time trying to develop skills.  I also have been knocked down and not been afraid to get back up.  An example of that is the Colorado Trust funded scholarships.  I applied, was a finalist, and wasn’t selected.  I specifically sought feedback from panel members and worked towards [addressing those concerns] and I applied again and got it.  So, that’s an example of a time when I got knocked down and went back again and was successful.  I’d put it down to not giving up.  If it is something you really believe in or want to do, or want to learn, you’ve got to keep working at it. – Janelle, Non-Profit Director of Communications

(on being an entrepreneur):  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. – Heather, Craft distillery owner

Find someone who is doing the kind of thing that you want to do and find out where they are publishing, how they are doing it…find a good editor who’s willing to spend some time helping you learn and editing you so that you learn how to become a better writer…read as a writer.  Look at how stories are put together and you can try to imitate that.  - Christie, Science writer

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How did I get here? Desiree, Owner, Spark Wellness

Posted on December 19, 2012 | Leave a comment

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 →

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Who do you want to be today? Desiree, Owner, Spark Wellness

Posted on December 12, 2012 | Leave a comment

What is your title?

I am a classical homeopath.

How would you describe what it is that you do?

My practice is homeopathy.  What I do is recommend homeopathic remedies to heal people.  It’s kind of a weird role, because a lot of times people that come to see me just haven’t gotten any help from the medical world.  So they don’t need a diagnosis, they just need somebody to listen to them.  Or they have weird symptoms and nobody believes them.  And that’s right where I come in.  Weird symptoms are great for me.

Business-wise, I am a small business owner, so I do all the marketing, I do all the hiring, I do staff management, bookkeeping (I have a bookkeeper who helps, but…), all the nitty-gritty small business stuff.   Continue reading →

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How did I get here? Doug, STEM Education Consultant

Posted on November 28, 2012 | Leave a comment

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 →

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Who do you want to be today? Doug, STEM Education Consultant

Posted on November 21, 2012 | Leave a comment

What is your title?

It is STEM Education Consultant.

Tell me a little bit about it. How would you describe what you do?

I work with a variety of institutions, either for profit, government, or non-profit, designing, developing, and evaluating education products that are specifically geared towards K-12 students or their teachers.

What do you do in a typical day?

Oh goodness. That depends on the projects. It depends on my clients. Obviously as a consultant, the best way to get a job is to do whatever your client wants you to do. And do it more creatively, faster, and obviously as a result for less cost than other people. I specialize in niche market products and programs. On a typical day I could be talking with a client to figure out their vision for their product or their program, developing or managing the process of developing the product.

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Who do you want to be today? Heather, Distillery Owner

Posted on November 7, 2012 | 1 Comment

Heather is the owner of Syntax Spirits, a craft distillery in Colorado.  she made the transition from engineer to distillery owner over the past few years, and sat down with me to talk about her journey and what inspired her to pursue this career.

What is your job title?

You know, that’s funny. That’s changed a lot. Over the last couple years, when we first started I wasn’t actually comfortable saying that I own the company, or I run the company, but now that I’m kind of settled into the role, I usually say owner. And that’s how I feel about it these days. But it’s kind of funny to me though that I wouldn’t have thought that was much of a thing, but it was in my head at the time.

That takes a lot of responsibility.

Exactly. It was a kind of a like,  okay, I really do do this for a living. Continue reading →

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Monday Musings: On work, life, and finding your passion

Posted on October 29, 2012 | 4 Comments

I recently attended the inaugural edition of The Blogcademy, a workshop on how to be a professional blogger from Gala Darling, Kat Williams (Rock n Roll Bride), and Shauna Heider (Nubby Twiglet).  Now, while the dream is alive of someday having a job that is more task-focused rather than punching the 40-hour-per-week clock, I don’t know that I’ll ever manage to be a professional blogger.   I’m quite inspired to try, now, though!

Attending this workshop was amazing.  Here are three women who are living the dream – doing work that they are passionate about; that doesn’t feel arduous or painful or that they wake up in the morning dreading.   Sounds fabulous, right?

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Who do you want to be today? Eric, Recording Studio Producer

Posted on October 24, 2012 | Leave a comment

guitar

Describe your job – what does a producer do?

One of the things that I love about it is that there’s no such thing as a typical day. Every day is completely different. So I’ll work on – well, today is probably as good of example as anything else. So I started the day working on finalizing an album project for a band – the final stages of mixing the last couple songs, and getting that all together before that goes out for mastering.

Then I jumped into a music search for a documentary film.  They are looking for music from both independent artists as well as needle drop library music.  We do a lot of licensing of both of those kinds of music.   Music supervision is the job role [there]. And that’s one of my favorite things to do. It’s really fun. I do it more often for ads than for films, but it’s really fun to get to do it on films.  I got to supervise the music for this full feature that we are going to finish tomorrow, and it’s just – it’s really fun to get to sort of just have that much creative control over a film, ‘cause it really – the music totally steers your emotions. And especially this was a really emotional topic. It was about school teachers who go travel to Africa to climb Mt. Kilimanjaro, and they go visit orphanage, and all sorts of other things.  It’s one of the most creative parts about the job, and I just love being able to do it. And we’ve done probably 7 or 8 features already this year, which has been great.

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