Tell me about your professional jobs if you have them. ( advice sought)

This summer I decided to go back to school and am still undecided as to what to study. Computers, teaching, etc. I want to do a job I can handle. Right now I work 40 hours a week at a desk job and it takes everything I have to keep it going. I don’t think I can handle something too much more stressful. Can people here recommend professional jobs they tried? I’m especially wondering if programming would be too stressful. My therapist is pessimistic and thinks I should just keep my current job but I already enrolled to go back to school. Any help appreciated. :slight_smile:

Why do you want a professional job do you have a dollar amount your looking for or are you embarrassed of a lesser job?

I feel like I can handle something more challenging than what I’m doing now. Physically I get tired easily but mental work still seems to be ok for me. If I can do more, why not? It’d be nice to buy a house one day and all but I don’t usually think that far. I just want to try my best to get the most out of what I have.

3 Likes

I teach at a college, but it’s only part-time. I consider it less stressful than my side job, but maybe I wouldn’t feel that way if I had the responsibilities that come with being a full-time faculty member, I don’t know. I don’t recommend part-time college teaching, since it doesn’t pay the bills very well; I do it because I failed multiple times at lab work, couldn’t hack it, lack the required focus and short-term memory. My other job is as a technician in a very busy pharmacy, gets to be more than I can handle sometimes.

1 Like

I had the idea to have a career

  • i didn’t check if i had in me enough to hold down a normal job first (although I once did work in a farm shop ft for 6 months
    for me it was all about achievement - not saying that is you - but for me - i wasn’t capable… the stress of responsibility or of intense studies led me 3 x into hospital

I had to give up the big dream

But then found myself in disability theatre (writing)

Tukey it is no small achievement to be able to work 40 hours at a desk job. Personally I would go with computer programming. We talked extensively before and you know I love finance and investing. In recent years there has been significant boom in Financial technology or FinTech. I am not too familiar with it but I think it deals extensively with programming skill sets. I really think that is the way of the future, if you can get into a company that develops financial software, you can make big money. Think of Microsoft, Apple or Google, they are all software and hardware companies in their own respective fields. I think if you enjoy doing something, you can do it for much longer periods than 40 hours a week. My myself, I can never see myself doing routine and menial clerical tasks full time, however if I am doing something that is intellectually challenging and engaging, I can do it for much longer periods.

Don’t let your therapist’s opinion shape who you are. My psychiatrists have been wrong about me and there are many examples of that here with others also. At the end of the day, you know your abilities and interests best. It seems you are struggling in finding a direction for your career much like myself. After many years of failure and testing in school, I am set in a career of finance/investing. Sometimes it takes a bit of exploring by taking some introductory courses to see if you like the program.

I would recommend you to sign up at https://www.coursera.org/
It is free and has some basic courses from various universities around the world. I wouldn’t say the material they have is in depth, but for free courses they are good enough. There are business and programming courses, so you can do them before committing to an actual school program requiring money.

2 Likes

“Tell me about your professional jobs”

I thought all jobs were professional?
nobody hires a non-professional anymore, which explains the unemployment rate

I am not sure if my comment would be of use to you. I used to work as software developer for small company.

It is mind boggling. Why?

  1. Need to study the customers requirement and try to meet their requests of feature
  2. Need to complete the program feature before the deadline
  3. Need to maintain the program from time to time

It is crazy that you would need to work out the coding from the bottom up while work out the feature as per customer requirement from the top down.

What’s next?
Mastering a programming language and database administration is not enough. Employer expects you to master a few technical skills, e.g. iOS and Android for mobile developer job vacancy. I am not sure about the US job market but here in my country, a mobile developer must be able to code in both iOS and Android (frontend) as well as in web application (backend).
What’s more?
Technical skill is one thing, but understanding of the program logical flow is another. Accounting, Payroll, Logistics, Point of Sale, Inventory, Billing is a few to name. Understanding of POS system logic flow does not necessarily mean the programmer knows how to design and develop an accounting system, and vice versa.

In short, you would need to be able to catch up the latest computer technology. That’s all from me.

I’m 26, I used to be high functioning. But the medicine I’m on just takes so much out of me that I can barely see myself maintaining even a part time job. Socializing and concentrating the way you guys do make me feel like an out of touch rich kid who never had a problem until now. What meds are you guys on and what dosages that you can go about your lives normally?

I can’t believe my old post got revived! I’ve already discovered it’s a little hard for me to do work… I’m not suffering from any extremely serious side effects on Latuda 80 mg. It doesn’t affect my negative symptoms that I’m aware of though I do have to live with the nausea.