Feel free to be economic with the truth by using aliases for organizations and products wherever it protects your privacy or your contracts. I’m mainly interested to hear about your unique experience.
Example follow-up questions: What was most rewarding, what was not? What was not a great use of your time but maybe still a learning experience? What were you interested when you were younger (for hobbies or otherwise) that may have helped guide you?
Be 18. Get scholarship. Study literature. Drop out. Run away. Join a protest movement. Be homeless at MIT for a while. Find job. Get hurt at said job. Get workers injury insurance payment after 2 years of recocery. Go back to school for math. Be good at math. Found tech related non profit. Spend 6 months in Kurdistan, setting up wifi. Finish math school. Fuck it, get masters because good at math. Get hired by foreign company oversees to work on self driving cars. Doesn’t work. Won’t work. Quit. Go to Greece, teach refugee kids how to us MS office. Watch neo Nazis burn down refugee school and computer lab. Suddenly it’s March of 2020 (COVID) and nothing to do because Nazis and no more computer lab. Oh fuck. Find PhD program in “trustworthy ai” to figure out why car not work. Prove car never work. Get PhD. Get paid to critique AI and play on super computers while working from home and having zero day to day oversight. Get paid to travel the world. Get paid to shit on Google, Facebook , Openai, and Tesla.
I went from homeless to visiting my 40th country in 10 years, while having a PhD.
No regrets.
Based as fuck. Shame about the Nazis though, those poor kids didn’t deserve to have their school burnt down for existing.
well, the German Neo Nazi who came to town maaaaaay have gotten assaulted by somebody using a big ass bicycle lot and escorted off the island.
https://www.stonisi.gr/post/7411/eftasan-kai-oi-germanoi-neonazi-pics
yes, yes violence is bad, but literal Nazis are worse.
Nice. More of them to get a taste of their own medicine. The time line is awful, I didn’t know Greece had so much violence against immigrants. Second link was broken though.
must be your client. the link works fine for me. If you see the timeline, locals mostly weren’t involved and lots of local anti fascists organized and fought back. This island was nominated for the Nobel prize when the crisis started, but there’s only so much people can take when the refugees kept coming, the island couldn’t support thousands of extra people, and refugees were forced to cut down centuries old olive trees for cooking fuel. Greece is not a wealthy country and they felt betrayed by places like Sweden and Germany that have robust economies and a much smaller proportion of the refugee crisis.
Something had to give. Moria camp is essentially an open air prison without running water or showers. Most people who arrive are children, or were before they walked to Turkey from the Congo or Afghanistan or whatever and boarded boats for a chance at a better life.
I heard stories from teenagers who had escaped slavery or been forced to work in fast fashion factories in Turkey without pay or had their passports stolen in Iran or picked up by a militia in the Syrian civil war and handed a weapon. And the EU just leaves them there. They get like €200 a month, if and when their legal case ever concludes, but that’s not enough to actually live and they’re not allowed to work. Not like Greece has extra work anyway.
Maybe the countries that make a fortune by selling arms to conflict zones (France, Germany, Sweden, Belgium, Italy) should step up and take care of the crises they manufactured for profit. But nah, they just elect far right parties because brown people are scary.
This one starts back in high school:
Have plans to enter West Point, build a military career, retire from the military at 50 and do civilian work for fun to pass the time. Get shot in the eye with a bb gun at 14, which ends all military aspirations. Pick the second choice college because they accepted me first with a scholarship. Go to college for physics, but listen to the guidance counselor about the 7 week intro web programming course. Drop out of physics and change major to computer science at the last possible second in the first semester of the first year. Continue to take various history courses throughout college that don’t count to a history degree. Graduate and move back in with mom for the summer. Apply to relevant jobs for over a year without success, pick up some work in grocery stores in the meantime. Quit the hometown grocery store at the end of the summer after publicly confronting the store owner about threatening to illegally deduct from my paycheck. Move in with college roommate and friend in the big city while still applying for relevant work and working at Aldi. Work with a communist store manager and have political discussions with him during the George Floyd protests and COVID. Get hired into QA for a big video game company. Walk out with the others when a major sexual harassment lawsuit is filed against the company. Walk out again when the CEO is discovered to be complicit and enabling the harassers. Walk out and go on strike when workers get laid off. Start organizing a union. Win my union.
I feel like I should have pursued my first choice college more, because it was a big 10 public college while the second choice was a private liberal arts college (take a guess which one was cheaper). By far the most rewarding thing in my career has been my part in winning the fight to organize my union. I didn’t realize it then, but now it seems clear that my interests and actions throughout my life have led me to a career as an activist.
First job out of college was as a statistician. I couldn’t lie that much.
Then I worked as a microbiologist. It stunk.
Then I worked as a plant breeder, it was fun but the pay sucked without a Ph.D.
Took a job as and international marketing and product manager (paid the same as the PhD). Traveled all over the world. It was brutal but fun. Jetlag and stress started destroy my health.
Took a job as a consultant to farmers. It wasn’t bad until a new CEO decided to change things and lose a ton of money.
Currently working for a smaller company that basically doesn’t care what I do as long as it’s profitable. Contracting research, selling seeds & beneficial insects, etc to farmers. Set my own schedule and do my own thing. I let the CEO know what I am up too once a year or so. Spent most of the last month playing PlayStation after doing way too much this spring. Gotta pace myself after all.