Monday, May 24, 2010
Week 3
Here we go - one more week! Hope you finish up in great style. Ask your mentors about their career paths - see if they ever had a "Plan B". Ask them how close their present work is to their "dream" job. Maybe even ask them how happy they are with their career or whether they have plans to change it.
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My mentor never had a plan "A", she told me. She went in to college with a vague idea of what interested her, what subjects she liked, and above all what she was not interested in. It wasn't until after she graduated from college that she decided to go to medical school. As for her feelings towards the job, she says it has definately gone through phases. At first, working in the ER was exciting and the patient-doctor interaction was very personally rewarding, she says. Although she still enjoys pediatric emergency medicine, she has come to find more satisfaction from the teaching aspects of her career. She now sits on various boards and committees, and is spending a lot of time looking at ways to improve the medical care available to children. My mentor has been working at her job for twenty years; from what I have gathered, she is very highly respected and seems to really excel in the environment.
ReplyDeletehey everyone,
ReplyDeleteweek 2 was just as interesting and educational as the first. im having a great time at Walgreens Pharmacy. with all that they let me do there, I am able to experience a lot more than I imagined. With multiple Pharmacists and Pharmacy Techs, I really have multiple mentors to learn from. I wear a lab coat now and get many comments a day from people about how professional I look :) I look forward to making my last week just as incredible of an experience as the last two. I hope everyone else is getting some insight on a potential career, because I know I am. ~ Laszlo
Hey, hope everyone enjoyed their Senior Project as much as I did. I asked my mentor, a second grade teacher. If she ever had a "Plan B" and if this was her dream job. She informed me that since she was a young child, she wanted to be a teacher. Her father always told her she had to be a teacher or doctor "so that she could support herself and didn't have to rely on her husband" (which I found pretty funny). But anyhow, Mrs. Dylag also let me know that she would not have done anything differently. After many, many years of teaching second grade, she has not regretted it for once second. Hopefully I can find a career that I feel just as passionate about.
ReplyDeleteSorry for all the typos, I am in a hurry :)
ReplyDeleteMy mentor never had an exact plan with his career. He began as a social worker most of his life and then after years of doing the job he didn't feel the same when he first began. He said he always had a personality that made him want to interact with people but he did not know what his ideal profession would ever be. It was only by chance that he became an insurance agent, after meeting a man who worked for State Farm and kept going on about how much fun it was for him. Ever since then, my mentor has been hooked on State Farm
ReplyDeleteMy mentor knew he wanted to do something with engineering but he wasn't sure what. He didn't have any exact plan a or b but he knew he wanted to be able to see things through from start to finish. Research was too slow moving. Ironically enough I think the slow moving aspect of research is the exciting part of his job.
ReplyDeleteAfter he got out of college he just picked the best offer which was NASA. He's moved up to project manager and would not mind advancing but he's content where he is right now.
My mentor's career today was actually her Plan B. She went into undergrad to study physical therapy. Although she majored in it, she didn't stick with it because she didn't like it. It was when my mentor realized that she didn't like physical therapy that her Plan A shifted to Plan B--medicine. She admitted that she didn't know some of the premed material as well as other conventional med students because she hadn't concentrated in the field for much of her undergrad, but it really made no difference because she worked just as hard as the others and today is a great specialist in her field. That's one of the biggest things I respected about having a mentor like her, she drove home the fact that you can never be sure of what path you'll take, even if you think you're set. As long as you keep your mind open and work hard at the same time, you'll end up in a great place.
ReplyDeleteEveryone I asked at the Kemper house either couldn't remember having a Plan B or deserted it when they arrived at the Kemper House and realized that that was where they wanted to be. A few of the care-givers are in nursing school right now, and their job at the Kemper House is not their ideal job, but they still told me that they enjoyed it.
ReplyDeleteThis week was a lot of fun, I went up on Saturday to pick up all of my papers from my mentor and some of the patients recognized me, even in jeans a t-shirt, and it made me feel so important because some of them can't even remember their children or their husbands, but they remembered me :)
I think that I'm really going to miss everything about the Kemper House, even the too-far-gone-to-remember-that-they're-in-a-nursing-home, aggravating patients that made the days either drag on or fly by, depending on their mood.
My mentor never had a plan b either. She started teaching when she was 21 years old, and fresh out of college. She has been a fifth grade teacher for 22 years now, and loves ever minute of it. I asked her if she ever thougth about switching jobs and she said NO!!!. She said that teaching is her favorite thing to do, and she would never change her profession ever. My mentor was very inspirational and showed me that teaching is definately what I want to do when I grow up!
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