When I graduated college, I was proud to have gotten a degree in what I considered a hard science. Physics is a hard subject, but undergraduate programs in physics are preparing their students to pursue graduate programs in physics. They are not preparing their students to become engineers. The approach is perfectly reasonable since industry want's to hire someone who was trained to enter industry, with a set of skills for the industry, i.e. an engineer. The school is training someone to think about more fundamental questions where we don't even know what we don't know.
At 22 years old with my degree in physics and 5 years of needling my engineering friends about how I was a scientist and NOT an engineer, I was completely unaware of what the world wanted or needed. I assumed that everyone would see my value as a scientist. I spent the next 5 years on a factory floor in a manufacturing facility. It was a wonderful experience.
I took a job in a manufacturing company after an intense search for a job. I must have submitted resumes to dozens of companies. This was before the era of online applications, and internet searches. At the time there was no world wide web. I sought a position where I could use my advanced math and understanding of the fundamental laws of nature to derive whatever I needed, but after reading the job descriptions in rooms full of three ring binders, and going to job fairs carrying my resume from table to table, I began to realize that I needed to figure out what marketable skills I actually had. I needed to figure out what I could do that the companies wanted, and how I could demonstrate that. In the mean time, I continued to visit company offices in the area. I had heard rejection so much that I didn't even ask if there were opening, I just asked that they put my resume on file and let me know if an opportunity became available. Finally, after driving around in miserable Texas heat for hours, and giving my standard line, the stand-in receptionist on duty at one of the companies asked me to wait. She was just filling in for the regular receptionist who would probably have just taken my resume and laid it on a stack. Instead, as the executive assistant to the facility manager, she spoke to her boss, who offered to interview me on the spot if I had the time. As it happened, I did. While waiting for the interview, I turned to another person in the lobby and ask, "So, what does this company actually do?" I ended up taking the job.
The point of my diatribe is not, as it might be assumed, that my persistence paid off, but rather, that my ignorance and ill-preparedness lead me to take a position that I new nothing about. I had not done research during my undergraduate degree into what the world needed. I had not done research into what the company did. I had not done research into what skills I could offer. I had assumed that the school that I had gone to knew what they were doing and had prepared me to be picked up, and that the companies hiring me would know what they needed and would know what to ask to find out if I fit. But it is forgivable that I should make that mistake the first time. The truth, however, is that that was just the first of many careers that I embarked on without knowing what I was getting into. In the absence of experience, it sometimes makes sense to see what happens. In the end the choice that I made to take that first job gave me insight into what I could do, what the world needed, what the world was. After 5 years I knew better what I wanted to do and take more deliberate steps. Unfortunately, I hadn't really learned the real lesson, that my days of learning would never end, that my view of the world would never stop expanding. The end of that 5 years was when I came to the first of a series of ah-ha moments where I looked back and thought, "Now, now I really know what the world is about. I only thought that I knew what it was about back then..."
My conversation with my friend, was just the latest in that series of epiphanies. The difference is that these days, neither my friend nor I are surprised when we have them and neither of us presume that they won't happen again. I imagine it as entering deeper and deeper into the woods until you come to a clearing and you can look around and get your bearings before you carry on along your journey. Eventually, you end up in a place where you're satisfied with the view and you've seen enough to know that the place you are is as good as any you've visited or at least better than the some of the places that you weren't willing to stay, so you set up camp to rest; for a while at least.
