Career Day

Career Day.  That one day in school where your teacher didn’t teach and someone from the community came in and talked about how important college was.  Except tomorrow?  I’m going to be one of those people from the community.  Yeah, I got invited to speak at our high school’s Career Day and it has me feeling every single year of my age.  It also has me feeling a little nervous.  I’m just not a huge fan of public speaking.  As I said in this post, my neck and chest are going to turn all red and it’ll get worse if someone points it out and wow, I just hope I can think of something to say.  So to help prepare me, I’m going to make a few notes here.  My career history (I had other jobs but these I think were actually somewhat related to my actual career):

1. I started my career in an internship at a local real estate.  I really ended up being a realtor’s personal assistant but I learned about business and developed a few Access Databases that helped them perform their job. I was able to solidify my desire to become a programmer.
2. I was offered an official internship as a programmer at a local manufacturing company at the end of my freshman year of college.  I did everything from help start the company’s Intranet to working on manufacturing programs drawing diagrams in a very cold computer room.
3. When I graduated college, I left there after being accepted as a contractor at a contracting company…same one I’m with now and the same one my dad used to work for and was able to give me a good recommendation.

What I learned from above:

• Internships are good
• College degrees are better
• Connections are the best

What I do

• Program computers LOL.  My dad never really explained it well what he did with work growing up and now I see why.  It’s hard to explain to someone who isn’t familiar with programming at all!  Thankfully today’s teens are really familiar with computers.
• Go to meetings and talk about what I’m going to program.  A lot.
• Document what I program.  A lot.

I’m specifically going to talk about working from home.  The advantages (obvious):

• Don’t have to get ready
• No commute time
• Home with my kids
• Don’t eat out a lot
• Don’t get distracted by people pulling you into many conversations

Disadvantages

• Hard to build vital relationships with coworkers
• Difficult to participate during meetings
• File transfers/jobs are slower
• Not in the office when you have computer trouble
• Can be easily distracted

Ok, and that concludes Career Day with Amy Bennett.  You can wake up now.