- #1
Mickey
- 163
- 0
Hi everyone. Thanks for reading this post.
I'm looking for a little guidance on how someone whose training is outside the hard sciences can break into a scientific career path. I know that it will inevitably involve going to back to school, but perhaps there are jobs I could do in the mean time? Maybe some lab grunt work?
Here is the direction I'm coming from:
My degree is a B.S. in Economics from a private Midwestern business school. I reluctantly settled on it because, well, time was running out and I needed to make money at something.
After graduation, though, the idea of working at XYZ bank seemed a whole, whole lot more unappealing than I had anticipated. Obviously, I know jobs aren't supposed to be fun and games, but the realization that it would be like this day after day got to me quickly. I really did not like the path I took in school.
I found an organization (http://www.rockportinstitute.com/) through a career guidance book (regular career counselors were very little help) that gave a career aptitude test, which would measure talents and give a profile for what careers I would likely find most stimulating and rewarding.
When my results came, the files that came with it said having low scores in some areas were nothing to be ashamed of, etc., and that having high scores in many aptitudes would actually make it harder, because there are so many areas that need attention.
I had no idea what it would look like. I knew I'd be good in something, I just wanted to know what that something was. Well, I'm still trying to get over some of the shock. I'm in the 99th percentile in four different areas, 95th and 90th of some others, and the upper quartile in the rest, except for one low score.
It's not out of a random sampling. Just the group of people who look for career guidance and take the test. Feeling it was possible that I was scammed, I asked the counselor they assigned to me to estimate the number of people the scoring takes into account, and he said at least 100,000 have taken it, that other institutions do it, it's just that the school system hasn't caught on, and that he's been doing this for years. And that he appreciated the question because that showed my analytical aptitude.
He said that I belonged in the frontier physical sciences as a specialist, working on inventions for small companies, doing things like alternative energy and nanotechnology.
He also said that my results support my not responding with open arms to your typical science education. I'm 99% spatially oriented, but schools don't have a spatially oriented style of curricula outside of Phy Ed. Also, outside of the aptitudes, I have a high "maestro" score, which means that I would prefer going in-depth on something, studying things that most people don't. Science curricula in everything below a Master's level moves from one area to the next, not going into much depth.
He asked me what original scientific discoveries I made in my spare time, which caught me off guard, because I didn't realize until that moment that that question could actually apply. I studied lucid dreaming, and did a number of experiments within lucid dreams, a topic out of the mainstream. It was personal and could be called "subjective science," but no less deserving of inquiry. I ruled out formal study of LDs as a career after I took an intro to psychology course. I didn't think I could stand the BS of psychology classes long enough until I had the freedom to do formal work, and I was probably right. I could barely stand economics.
So, anyways, here I am, a business grad who scores off the charts in tests for spatial ability (you know those tests where you mentally rotate objects or mentally fold up convoluted unfolded boxes? I do those in my sleep - literally) and is great at analytical reasoning, idea flow, associative memory, design memory, and basically everything except memorizing sets of randomly generated 10-digit numbers.
I'm in the 17th percentile on that. :grumpy:
I'm looking for a little guidance on how someone whose training is outside the hard sciences can break into a scientific career path. I know that it will inevitably involve going to back to school, but perhaps there are jobs I could do in the mean time? Maybe some lab grunt work?
Here is the direction I'm coming from:
My degree is a B.S. in Economics from a private Midwestern business school. I reluctantly settled on it because, well, time was running out and I needed to make money at something.
After graduation, though, the idea of working at XYZ bank seemed a whole, whole lot more unappealing than I had anticipated. Obviously, I know jobs aren't supposed to be fun and games, but the realization that it would be like this day after day got to me quickly. I really did not like the path I took in school.
I found an organization (http://www.rockportinstitute.com/) through a career guidance book (regular career counselors were very little help) that gave a career aptitude test, which would measure talents and give a profile for what careers I would likely find most stimulating and rewarding.
When my results came, the files that came with it said having low scores in some areas were nothing to be ashamed of, etc., and that having high scores in many aptitudes would actually make it harder, because there are so many areas that need attention.
I had no idea what it would look like. I knew I'd be good in something, I just wanted to know what that something was. Well, I'm still trying to get over some of the shock. I'm in the 99th percentile in four different areas, 95th and 90th of some others, and the upper quartile in the rest, except for one low score.
It's not out of a random sampling. Just the group of people who look for career guidance and take the test. Feeling it was possible that I was scammed, I asked the counselor they assigned to me to estimate the number of people the scoring takes into account, and he said at least 100,000 have taken it, that other institutions do it, it's just that the school system hasn't caught on, and that he's been doing this for years. And that he appreciated the question because that showed my analytical aptitude.
He said that I belonged in the frontier physical sciences as a specialist, working on inventions for small companies, doing things like alternative energy and nanotechnology.
He also said that my results support my not responding with open arms to your typical science education. I'm 99% spatially oriented, but schools don't have a spatially oriented style of curricula outside of Phy Ed. Also, outside of the aptitudes, I have a high "maestro" score, which means that I would prefer going in-depth on something, studying things that most people don't. Science curricula in everything below a Master's level moves from one area to the next, not going into much depth.
He asked me what original scientific discoveries I made in my spare time, which caught me off guard, because I didn't realize until that moment that that question could actually apply. I studied lucid dreaming, and did a number of experiments within lucid dreams, a topic out of the mainstream. It was personal and could be called "subjective science," but no less deserving of inquiry. I ruled out formal study of LDs as a career after I took an intro to psychology course. I didn't think I could stand the BS of psychology classes long enough until I had the freedom to do formal work, and I was probably right. I could barely stand economics.
So, anyways, here I am, a business grad who scores off the charts in tests for spatial ability (you know those tests where you mentally rotate objects or mentally fold up convoluted unfolded boxes? I do those in my sleep - literally) and is great at analytical reasoning, idea flow, associative memory, design memory, and basically everything except memorizing sets of randomly generated 10-digit numbers.
I'm in the 17th percentile on that. :grumpy: