Today Clare starts a new job. I am not sure of her exact job title, but she will be working for the University of Wisconsin’s State Laboratory of Hygiene. Her primary duties will involve the testing of water samples from around the state to determine levels of contaminants. Clare wanted a job with an environmental focus, and she wanted a job that gave her experience in a laboratory setting. Based upon these two criteria, this new position might be ideal.
As an aside to Clare’s job search, I found interesting my friends’ responses to my daughter’s period of unemployment. Clare worked for nearly three years in her first job out of college, but quit before finding something else. It took her nearly three months to land her new position. Some of my friends, upon learning that she’d quit one job before finding another, said, in one form or another, “Good for her.” In their minds, if the entry-level position had run its course, it was time to move on. Other friends were more cautious. They wondered whether I considered Clare reckless for going even a few months without a paycheck.
I, not surprisingly, was in the “good for her” camp. My daughter has a better mind and better social skills than I’ve ever had, and she’ll do well whenever she reaches the interview stage of the hiring process. If I had a concern, it was that this next job was going to be a turning point for her, yet not set her on the path she most wanted. Of the forty-plus jobs she’d applied for, about half were lab positions and half were jobs in college student services. During college, she’d worked for three years as an orientation leader/peer advisor to incoming students in the sciences, and she saw this as a second career option to explore. Clare is thinking about graduate school in three or four years, so this new job likely will be her last job before returning to school. If so, the work may determine her future field of study, and student services would have sent her in a different direction than laboratory work. Her heart resides in the sciences, so I am pleased that she found the job that she did.
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