Aaron
How long did it take you to find related to your degree/what you intended to do?
And while you were looking for said job, what kind of jobs did you have in the meantime? #programming #computer-engineering #computer-gaming #computer-graphics
3 answers
Peter Van Dyck
Peter’s Answer
Hi Aaron,
It is very rare that you will find your ideal job at your first solicitation.
I had a Computer science degree in 1984 and in the end it took me almost 6 years to get into a position where I could actually use my learned skills in the job.
I started off in 1984 as a Warehouse Clerk at WANG EUROPE, following up on Priority one requests for Hardware spare parts. Needed to learn Word Processing & International Logistics rules by myself. Due to my analytical knowledge & Computer knowledge I could adjust some of the procedures the Warehouse people were using by automating some steps (that warehouse people would never have seen)
In the end we automated the system so fare that the Priority One person no longer was needed and that this process could be done by any Warehouse Clerk.
I then moved on the European/Africa & Middle-East Order processing (in those day’s the only fast communication with Africa & Middle-East was via Telex or Telephone, fax systems were just picking up. (oh yes E-mail and mobiles didn’t exist then) That job I only did it for 2 years.
Then I moved on in the same company to the Marketing/Education department for WANG distributors in Africa & Middle-East. This is where I actually could start using my educated skills to the max. This job I did for about 2 years. Then the economic crises started and many American IT companies were closing their business in Europe.
This brought me to the idea to differ my knowledge to other (non-IT) related jobs.
I started to use my skills from Warehousing & Order Management (recruited in the past 6 years) to my advantage and moved to the European Purchasing Department of the same company. This allowed me to still work/sell/ buy Hardware but if the business would turn sour, I could position myself as a Purchaser outside of the IT business as well.
After this I went in the same company into Purchasing + Logistics responsible + Asset Manager + project management + Delivery management
After 14 years I changed from company to Dell
Where I had different positions from Sales (4 years) to Technical Sales Representative (7 years) to Bid Manager (7 years)
As you can see, if someone would have told me I would end up after a career of 32 year as a Bid Manager, I would probably not believed him.
Never the less, I found my journey very interesting & divers. And all the functions I did provided me always with enough internal satisfaction.
Dhairya Dalal
Dhairya’s Answer
But the reality is, many people end doing something different than what they studied. This is not a bad thing. Part of the challenge is that the real world often doesn't align to your expectations when you are in college. I was a creative writing major in college.
My career meandered through various different roles. When I graduated, the first job out of college was working in IT with an insurance company where I focused on mobile engineering and application virtualization. After 2.5 years, I found myself bored and left. My next two jobs were at Harvard. The first was working as a business systems analyst on a software dev team building an internal HR application. Again I found myself under challenged, so I switched to a research analyst position with the Office of the President and Provost instead. It was a prestigious position, where I provided strategic decision making and policy advice to senior leaders. I did for this for about 2.5 years. When I found myself limited in growth and advancement opportunities, I knew it was time to change.
The space of artificial intelligence seemed fascinating and covered a set of problems I wanted to tackle. So I've spent the last year learning as much as I can about artificial intelligence and machine learning at the Allen Institute for Artificial Intelligence and the Allen Institute for Brain Science. I'll be transitioning again to work at a startup as a data scientist, where I'll be developing NLP and machine learning models to support AI driven chatbots. Over the past 10 years, I have 5 different jobs across 4 different spaces.
The best advice I can give is to keep on open mind. When you are in your twenties, you have the space to make mistakes, follow diverse opportunities, and experiment. Give yourself that space and you may surprised to find new opportunities you may not have imagined while in college. Also rather than thinking about jobs, try thinking about problem spaces you're interested in tackling and look for opportunities there.
