After graduating from college and working in your field, did you change your mind?

Becoming a Chef, a good Chef, requires someone with good sense of business .

So it is not what change of direction you take. It is how you re engineer your skills.

I never worked in my field of stody (Oceanography). I fell in love with writing and editing and never looked back.

I dropped out of college mid-way through my sophomore year, because I didn’t know what I wanted to be and was acutely depressed for a number of reasons. After a couple years working clerical jobs, I went to Community College – still without a clue. I took a few random electives that piqued my curiosity and followed where that led, which was to a Master’s in Audiology. That was 17 years ago, and I still love what I do!

@hearkat YAY!! I’m starting to think that going to college right after high school is a bad idea.

I got a rather pathetic BA in astronomy and went right into a wonderful research job at the Harvard Observatory. A year after Sputnik was launched, the US gov’t was throwing money into all the relevant programs.

When I moved to NYC 7 years later, I turned down a job to run the public lectures at the Hayden Planetarium (too nervous) and found myself teaching French to 3d and 4th graders.

Then when I remarried and moved to Philly, I became the Director of College Placement at a Quaker day school.

My liberal arts training taught me how to learn the skills I needed. It still does, definitely.

@kikibirdjones: My son just graduated High School in June, and is not yet enrolled in college. He was unsure what he wanted to do. He is currently planning to start a business, and so will take courses for business (at least that is the current plan, which is subject to change).

There is nothing wrong with going straight into college after High School. But there’s no point in going to an expensive 4-year school if you are undecided on a career (unless you have an athletic scholarship, or something). It makes more sense to go to a local 2-year school and take the core courses that are required for basically any major, and then explore your options through electives, as I did.

It can’t happen to me, since I went to college to learn better skills, not to prepare myself for any particular career.

I didn’t really work in my field, none of us did, because the field was very broad and not specialised. One of us became a magician, another an olympic athlete, another got a job at HMV. Most work as journalists or photographers, I became a producer at a record company. Some continued studying and became university professors.

I completely agree with @ChazMaz – even if you decide to change direction, you’re almost always building on some of the skills that you learned when studying for your first career.

I went to school to be a stage manager, did that full-time for several years, and then decided to use all of my management, organization and bizarre-problem-solving skills to start a business and freelance as a personal organizer. That’s probably not what I’ll do forever, but whatever I do next will definitely build on both the theater and personal assistant skills. There’s nothing wrong with changing direction – very few people are able to choose a career when they’re 18 that they’ll still enjoy when they’re 50. But, as long as you enjoy what you choose the first time around, chances are it’ll still be useful when it’s time to move on to your next career!

I did it backwards. I got in a profession I liked, and then went to college to advance in the field I chose.

I have graduated as cheff and that happend before i became a prodiction operative worker.

@pathfinder: A pleasure, as always. (You’re not fooling me, you prodictive person, you.)