At the moment I'm employed by Los Alamos National Laboratory as a Historian of Science. I'm part of a team of eight that includes four archaeologists, one historic architect, one architectural student, and a building contractor who specializes in historic preservation.
I prepare historic contexts of Manhattan Project and Cold War-era facilities scattered throughout the laboratory. Since many buildings in Los Alamos were built between 1950-1960 and are owned by the federal government, US law dictates these buildings have to be thoroughly documented before they're heavily modified or torn down. I dive through technical reports, parse environmental records, and interview scientists in an effort to document how these laboratories contributed to the scientific community.
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But it's not the whole story.
Getting to this point is what's important. It's a plodding story, yet I want to share - if only to let you know that you don't have to lock yourself into a career once you're at that magical minimum age of adulthood. Or, more importantly, that getting from A to B is a hell of a lot more convoluted than a lot of people would care to admit at times.
Eighteen months ago it was nowhere near certain that I would earn this job. A
decade ago... this would have been so out of the question that you might as well have told me that an eccentric billionaire would launch his sedan into space. I'd been a terrible student during my undergraduate years, just graduated during the greatest economic crisis since the Great Depression, and had little in the way of real survival skills.
For years, trudging through University, I lived in a state of near permanent deferment of adulthood - hoping just to amble on until I got my PhD and ending up in a tenure track. For years, I followed this plan like it was just supposed to fall in my lap without any serious work or learning on my end. Since then, I've had to do
a lot of growing up.
As part of this long road, I've dabbled in a lot of jobs. Here's a brief sample of what I've done since 2000:
Worked as a dishwasher and a line cook for a restaurant for seven years.
Sung in a semi-professional
a capella quartet that specialized in chamber choir music for weddings.
Spent half a year working for the Americorps in New Mexico.
Had a
very brief stint as a stock photographer, which ended almost as soon as I saw that I would be competing with studios that had portfolios with tens of thousands of images (versus the 2,000 I had in my catalog at the time).
Worked for the National Park Service for eight years as a seasonal Park Ranger, which included:
A one-year stint as a Backcountry Ranger
A one-year posting as acting Fee Supervisor (think glorified cashier but with a mandatory seven-year background check because you're handling money for the federal government).
And a six-month assignment as Lead Ranger for a National Monument (which encompassed 55 sq. mi [142.45 sq. km], about 2,000 archaeological sites, a monthly visitation of 21,000 people, and a permanent staff of six).
And - most recently - worked for a local Chamber of Commerce visitor center for anywhere between 10 to 20 hours a week in an effort to stave off unemployment benefits. (The current administration has made seasonal Ranger positions far more onerous for the Park Service, which ended up forcing me out of federal service when the parks I used to work for could no longer hire me.)
Over the last nineteen years, I've had to learn how to manage my time and actually, well,
learn. I had to learn how work with people, instead of being the anxious loner I was during my collegiate years. I've had to realize that - just because you started out pursuing a particular degree - doesn't mean you have to be completely tied down to pursuing that path for the rest of your life.
Your mileage may vary as you go through school and into the world, but I can not stress this paraphrased quote from Dwight Eisenhower enough:
"Plans are useless, but planning is everything." Don't ever feel like you're a failure because you did not fulfill your plan to a tee. Keep your options open, and be willing to maintain a flexible mindset. Always be willing to look in nooks and alleys that you never thought might be worth a glance. Keep in touch with mentors and friends - email is a godsend* in that regard.
The upshot? Don't be like past me and think that "if at first you don't succeed, you fail." That cost me a lot of time and youth that could have been better misspent on other adventures. In retrospect, this is probably why I'm on forums like this - to
properly misspend what I squandered so long ago. But, in short...
You got this!
-Tar
*Yes, I predate the World Wide Web. Yes, I am old. I remember getting my first email address in 1994... dear god, that was 25 years ago.
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