Bees Get Degrees
Want to know a) what other people with your same college degree are doing, and b) how much they’re earning doing it? Check this thingy out!
Here are mine:
Psychology (females, my age group)
I wouldn’t want to be any of those.
Philosophy (females, my age group)
That’s…surprising.
Math (females, my age group)
Hey, there’s postsecondary teachers!
Could be worse, I suppose. I’d rather be happy than rich!
Future Outlook
Dudes, check it:
“To determine the best and worst graduate degrees for jobs, Fortune consulted the careers site, PayScale. The site considered the full-range of graduate degrees, including Ph.D.s, master’s degrees, and law degrees.”
The ranking is based upon three factors: long-term outlook for job growth, median salaries at mid-career, and job satisfaction scores.
Guess what was ranked highest?
Ph.D., Statistics
Median Salary: $131,700
Projected Growth in Jobs by 2022: 23.7%
Highly Satisfied: 71%
Low Stress: 67%
An MS in stats made the list, too!
Master’s, Statistics
Median Salary: ($109,700
Projected Growth in Jobs by 2022: 18.2%
Highly Satisfied: 80%
Low Stress: 51%
I know it’s just one ranking, but it’s pretty cool that the thing that I love doing has the potential to lead to jobs that are high-paying and satisfying.
Mini Rant
I’ve always hated the phrase “you are not your job” when used as a way to state that what you do for a living shouldn’t define who you are.
“But why, Claudia?”
I’ll tell you why! One of the first things we ask a new acquaintance/date/dude we sit next to on the bus is “what do you do?” And people respond with all sorts of things. “I am a barista.” “I am a student.” “I am a rocket scientist.” “I am currently unemployed.”
Clearly, jobs matter (or we just really suck at asking each other interesting questions).
So my claim is this: if we’re so bent on being interested in other peoples’ jobs, clearly we must think that the job itself has something to do with the person’s personality or likes or desires or whatnot.
And if we expect someone’s job to be a reflection of them (why else would we ask what they did for a living, after all?), clearly we think that there’s something going on where our jobs should at least bring us some modicum of joy.
Right?
So what am I saying? I’m saying that your job shouldn’t define who you are—you should find a job where your attitude about said job defines who you are.
EXAMPLE: suppose there’s this dude who really, really, really liked repairing watches. So he gets a job as a watch repairer. Now, watch repairer is probably not the sort of occupation where you’d think, “man, is that guy gonna change the world or what?!” And the dude doesn’t think so, either. But that doesn’t change the fact that he really, really, really likes enjoys his job because he’s doing what he likes to do.
And every time someone asks him what he does, he enthusiastically replies, “I’m a watch repairer!” as if it was the coolest, most important thing a person could be.
Because to him, it is.*
Now obviously I know we can’t always have jobs like this—or even that many of us won’t ever get to have jobs like this. But I think we should never stop striving to have jobs that we want to have define us. Because if we’re not enthusiastic about the thing we spend most of our waking hours doing, why are we even bothering with life?
*Note: this is pretty much how I feel about my current job
A post! ApostapostapostapostaPOST!
TODAY WAS A GOOD DAY.
FIRST: my mom got a job, my mom got a job!! Here at the U of I! Now she can leave the insanity of Tucson and come back to the place she calls home. SUPER HAPPY ABOUT THAT.
SECOND: I got a job, too! In addition to teaching in the second half of summer, I’ll be working as a data analyst for the College of Ag from May through July. Now I can finally get some real experience with real data (and lots of it!).
Better brush up on my SAS.
WOOHA!
Working for the weekend? Not yet, but soon.
I have a job! Well, I WILL have a job in a few weeks (have to wait for the January Council of Counsilness to meet to get my approval). I need to start acquiring money ‘cause once I get my brain under control again, I totally want to go back to school.
It’s not a stats-related job, but it pays well, I can pretty much decide when during the day/week I want to work, and it will afford me the flexibility to take classes once the brain issues get resolved (which they BETTER) and I can concentrate.
And it’s a job that will directly help people, so that’s a good thing. I might also get the opportunity to learn Braille and/or ASL.
In the meantime, I must be frugal (even though I may have ~$3,000 in my Canadian account), try to remain relatively sane, and not have another day like Sunday.
Yeah. Right.
Polar Expressions
I would wash dishes for the rest of my life if doing so would be my job down at McMurdo or the South Pole.
Jobs! Jobs for weird polar-obsessed people like me!
One of my ultimate goals is still to get down there. Maybe once I get my current “issues” fixed up to the point that they’re manageable I’ll apply to be a kitchen helper or a janitor or a housing assistant. Hell, I’d sort their garbage if that would get me down there.
I wonder if they need anyone to run some stats…?
Stupid Late-Night Ponderings
Brought to you by the random, semi-coherent paragraphs scrawled out in my sketchbook. Because 17 hours is a long-ass shift.
“…and this is just a FRACTION of the savings you’ll see!”
Oh yeah? Well what if the “fraction” of savings you’re seeing is something like 9.99/10? That’s a pretty big ass fraction to be saying this is JUST a fraction. It just seems stupid.
“In the land of the blind, the one-eyed man is king.”
Says who? The one-eyed guy? The blind masses? Maybe the one-eyed man doesn’t want to be king. Maybe he just wants to steal the blind’s stuff and skip town.
“In the land of the blind, the one-eyed man can sure get away with a lot.”
“An eye for an eye leaves the whole world blind.”
And also fucks over a lot of optometrists. I wonder if this hypothetical world is the land of the blind. So how’d that one-eyed man escape this? Maybe everybody came to their senses in the middle of poking this guy’s eyes out—“wait…we need a ruler here! This guy has an eye, let’s let him do it!”
Why do all these sayings involve blind dudes?
“Sticks and stones can break my bones but words can never hurt me.”
Yes they can. Ever have someone scream “TACO TIME!” in your ear really loud?
Excruciating. I don’t have an eardrum anymore.
“It’s like shooting fish in a barrel!”
I can’t even describe how inefficient and messy that sounds like it would be. Why would you shoot the fish? For sport? Out of boredom? Because they mocked you? What are they doing in the barrel, anyway? Why wouldn’t you just bowl the barrel over if you wanted them dead? I think that would be more fun. “It’s like dumping a bunch of fish out of a barrel and not wasting any bullets!”
New job review!
So either last night was a really easy night, or this job will consist of me sitting on a couch for 11 hours, reading.
I’m cool with that.
New job!
Wow…well, getting a job this summer was a LOT easier than it was last semester. Second place I went to and I got it.
Now I will work at Seubert’s the in-home care place right next to Subway. I start tonight, actually, and I’m working from 8 PM to 7 AM for a lady. I shall review for you tomorrow!
You know what I’m really tempted to do?
So…
ETS, the company I want to work for when I’m done with all this school business, has a position open right now that would be absolutely PERFECT for me. It’s like my freaking dream job, listen to this:
Arrange for and perform routine statistical analysis and data-processing tasks using GENASYS, user-oriented computer packages, and statistical software packages. Create datasets, enter computer job control information, code parameters, and submit programs for execution. Draft standard statistical reports and assist in the preparation of complex reports. Prepare and check critical information for score reporting, tables, and figures for statistical procedures, documentation, and reports. Update textual material for such documents. Update and run routine statistical analyses using SAS. Perform a wide variety of statistical calculations (e.g., mean, percentiles, standard error of measurement, and reliability estimates).
I DON’T CARE HOW BORING THIS SOUNDS, THIS IS WHAT I WANT MY LIFE TO BE.
So I applied just on a whim…If I get the job, I’m outta here. Screw grad school for a few years. If it’s meant to be, it’s meant to be.
Though I don’t think they’ll take me though, ‘cause I think they’ll think I’m too far away to relocate “ASAP.”
Just one more group of classes to go…
Two things really good happened today:
1. Work’s over. For me, at least. I want a few days off before the next semester kicks into gear.
2. Buddhism’s done with and I got an A in it. That’s always a good thing.
Okay, I’m done for now. Long day.
Road trip, University of Idaho-style
Haha.
So today was the day Team 4 of the University Housing Summer Crew got in the van and drove halfway up Moscow Mountain to clean a house the university owns up there because some big-wigs were coming into town and needed a conference place.
Let me tell you what happened there.
Alice decides that we should go up there after noon, so after lunch break like eleven of us get in the van (plus her and Roy, with the floor team following us) and we drive through town and up an old gravel road towards Moscow Mountain. I mention the gravel road because it’s important later.
After about a ten minute drive, we reach this HUGE house the university apparently owns about halfway up the mountain. Alice and Roy split us up into groups doing various jobs to make the house pretty before the conference that’s apparently going on tomorrow. I was alone, luckily, and I was in charge of watering all the plants around the house. Turn on the water spigot, nothing comes out. “Okay,” I think, “there’s no water on the outside of the house. That’s cool, I’ll just go fill up the watering can inside.”
Apparently there was no water anywhere in the entire house.
At this point I would like to mention that it hit about 97 degrees today.
So there we all are, stranded on a mountain in a house with no water, the floor crew completely lost as to how to do the floors, the rest of us just chilling as Alice and Roy have it out with each other over the whole water situation. Eventually, somebody gets the sink in one of the bathrooms to start trickling water at an alarmingly low rate; we’re instructed to do what we can with about an eighth of a bucket of water each.
Once we were done, we were still stuck up there waiting for the floor crew to finish, so we all sat outside on the driveway in the shade of the garage, antagonizing wasps with sticks and pretending to be awesome until 3:50 rolled around and we got into the van to leave.
By this point we each of us had exhausted our bottles of water and were all really thirsty and hot. Because of this, we decided to ride home with the van windows open—which in hindsight, was a bad plan, since the gravel got kicked up and turned us all a beautiful dust color and made us even thirstier.
But we got back, we got Otter Pops, and I unfortunately live to work another day at the U of I.
Fun with Shag Carpets
You know what’s great?
Shag carpeting in college student housing. What freaking genius thought of that? “In these houses will live members of the messiest demographic aside from children (though some of them will have children and bring them with them). Let’s put carpeting that catches EVERY LITTLE THING in EVERY SINGLE ROOM! BRILLIANT!”
Morons.
On the upside, I discovered $3.27 in change in one apartment today. I also vacuumed up what looked like five years’ worth of shedding from a large dog.
Follow-up to yesterday
So this working alone thing?
AWESOME.
I can listen to as much music as I want and sing along with it, I can dance, I can clean in whatever order I want, and I can do things MY way.
I love this. This makes this job so much better.
This Just In: The U of I Actually Helped Me Find Meaning in My Life (But Not Really)
Yay, my anosmia has a use!
Today we were driving around South Hill Terrace (for who knows what reason—god knows we weren’t cleaning) and Roy and Alice start to talk about this apartment that apparently hasn’t been cleaned in over two years because of a horrible stench inside of it that nobody can stand long enough to get the stench out.
We drive up to the apartment and we all get out to check out the stinky place. We all go in and within two minutes everybody else has a headache from the smell and has to leave. I’m standing in there going “this isn’t a problem at all!”
So Alice decides that if I don’t mind, I can work alone to clean the apartment until the smell is gotten rid of. This apartment, by the way, is pretty damn gross—the carpet is all covered in dirt and leaves, the oven is completely covered in who knows what (both inside and outside), there are cobwebs in the sink and cabinets and on the railing, the light coverings are all yellow, there are dead moths, bees, ants, spiders, and other miscellaneous bugs everywhere.
But I will be happy to work alone. It will get me out of the terrible drudgery of working with the guy who thinks he’s god’s gift to the world just because he can clean a toilet.
Random crap
Hahaha, my supervisor’s hilarious. There are three of us under her supervision, me and two guys. Today we started in a new apartment and she was assigning us to different places to start cleaning. She told me that I would be cleaning the cabinets and the oven hood, and one of the guys (he’s worked there awhile and knows her well, so he was obviously just messing around) goes, “isn’t that reinforcing the female stereotype that they belong in the kitchen?” Without missing a beat she goes, “women belong in the kitchen…” and then handed him a toilet brush “…men belong in the toilet.” It was the perfect comeback with the perfect timing. We all laughed for like an hour.
Oh, and here’s something else that made me laugh. I was updating my Facebook today and noticed that, in my “favorite music” list, Dethklok fit alphabetically between Deep Forest and Enya. Dethklok is metal. Deep Forest and Enya are about as new age as you can get.
That’s hilarious.
I FINALLY have a job for the summer
Good captain Christ, I’m working at the University of Idaho.
And guess what? It sucks. Why? Because it’s the U of I.
This is what I do:
-wash doors
-wash/scrub oven hoods
-wash cabinets
-sit in the van
-do absolutely nothing because they can’t find the keys to the next apartment we’re supposed to clean
Yup. Exactly as I expected.
At least I finally got a damn job.
The quest for quarters often leads one through many couches
Hooray! So I think I’ve got a job, finally. So the only place that worked with my school schedule was Wendy’s so that is where I’ll be spending quite a lot of time for the rest of the summer. Orientation is Sunday!
…
Why are my blogs getting shorter and shorter?
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