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Notes -
How many of you have made major career changes? How long did it take you, or how did you go about it?
As a teenager I thought I might go to college on an athletic scholarship but as I moved up the food-chain it became clear that while natural talent and drive will get you far they wont get you as far as talent, drive, and time + money to spend on training. I was working a full time job and training on the weekends whereas a lot of the guys I was up against were training 6-7 days a week and the difference showed.
I joined the Navy as a pissed-off twenty something with something to prove. The intention was to become a Navy SEAL. While I made it through the initial candidacy phase I subsequently developed a lung infection that would prevent me from participating in dive training. Accordingly, I was offered a choice between either waiting a year to try again or taking a lateral transfer to do Combat Medicine/Search and Rescue with the Marines. (a specialty that was seriously undermanned at the time, especially with the invasion of Iraq on the horizon) I took the lateral transfer, and the rest as they say is history.
I did SAR/CASEVAC for approx 9 years finishing my time as a Detachement Lead, IE senior enlisted in charge of 30 - 40 people. By this I'd point become rather disillusioned with US foreign policy and when I received a job offer from [Notable Humanitarian NGO] to do basically do the same job I was already doing but for twice the take-home pay, my response was to call the detailing office and ask them what they were prepared to do to talk me out of taking it. They didn't talk me out of it and as a result I became one of those idiot do-godders you hear about in the news and see in movies going into crisis zones to help refugees and shit.
That lasted about two years before I decided that I wanted to return to the States, I took a job as a desk sergent/admitting officer at a big hospital, thinking that it would be a lot lower stress than driving an ambulance in a warzone or dealing with the craziness of east Africa but it wasn't and within year I was ready to call it quits. I decided to take advantage of the GI Bill to go to college. I majored in mathematics and did enough work at a high enough level to get my name on a couple of published papers and a patent. This is also around the time that I accidentally got the girl I'd been banging pregnant.
I was able to parlay the above (the patent not the pregnancy) into a contract with [Large Multinational Defense Contractor] afterwich they offered to bring me on as a salaried employee. I've been working as a "company man"/"cog in the military industrial complex" ever since.
Not sure if that answers your question, but there you go.
Thanks for the answer, definitely interesting. Im curious, why wasn’t the hospital job less stressful?
Honestly it was the patients.
When you're doing the ambulance thing in a crisis zone you're typically dealing with obvious problems that have obvious solutions gunshot wounds, broken bones, the baby is coming right now, that sort of thing. Concurrently people are, more often than not, very happy to see you and be receiving help. As stressful and traumatic as it often was, I enjoyed being able to honestly say that my skills and talents were making a difference.
Thing is that when you're the ground level point of contact for a big hospital in a reasonably nice first-world city you're not patching people up. You're mostly dealing with junkies, hypochondriacs, and dementia patients. You start to recognize the frequent fliers, and after you've found yourself resuscitating the same guy after an overdose for the third time you start to wonder why you even bother. It's depressing.
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