So I just had my first-and-probably-only-ever visit with a certified career counselor yesterday.?? He was a terrific source of info and a very perceptive, funny, personable, and effective guy.?? He also went a half hour over our allotted time (because, as he defined it, “that’s just what happens when you put a talker and another talker in the same room”) and didn’t charge me for it.?? Nice.?? So, the net results, you ask??? Where is the wind going to blow this little bird next?
a) Journalism – broadcast or written
b) Public Affairs/Relations
c) Branding
d) Not so much with the grad school/linguistics, or with the corporate or academic world in general – too many constraints for this “free spirit” or whatever
e) My obsession with financial security stops me from pursuing what’s really satisfying (and usually freelance)
So, my my my – what a load of interesting information!?? Granted, I’ll take that one man’s opinion with a certain grain of salt, but at the same time, he had a lot of really good feedback and asked a lot of the right probing questions.?? SO!?? I’m still kind of swimming with this.?? I never even CONSIDERED any sort of journalism-related career before.?? Ever.?? Ever.?? And I’m not surprised to hear “branding” but to be honest it’s not what I expected – I expected to hear “advertising” but his argument against why he thought I wouldn’t fare well in the ad-world is because I’m too morally inclined, and for example (since we were both drinking from Nalgenes, which I of course half-jokingly said give you cancer) if Nalgene were to hire me and say, okay, we know our water bottles give people cancer, but we want you to design a campaign that will sell them anyway, he said he thought I’d have a problem with that.?? And built up over a lifetime of a career, that’s a lot of cancer-causing ad campaigns.?? And you know what??? He’s right.?? Man.
I’m going to sit around and ponder my future career options and strategies some more, but if anyone wants a referral to a great career counselor in the meantime, drop me a line.