There is a blog I followed back in the day (livingafi.com) that is now long dormant.  I am rereading and enjoying it again.  Today I’m going to borrow an idea from it to start a  career series and highlight the top lessons of my 30-year career.   Even typing 30 years makes me feel old / weird. 

The Backup Plan

This post is about my first job after graduation. I don’t really consider it my first job, but more of a follow-on to school. When I graduated, I had no job offer. I had not been proactive in a job search and was not extremely motivated, as I had no real idea of what I wanted to do.

One day, in one of the school buildings, I saw a posting on the bulletin board. Old school: printed out paper stuck to a corkboard with push pins. It was for an Engineering and Science exchange program called IAESTE. It was targeted at students completing their 3rd year for what was basically a co-op position. The difference was that these jobs were located in 30+ countries around the world.

I saw this poster about five or six months prior to graduation. I thought this could be a “Plan B” in case I didn’t find a job. Digging into it, I found there were no rules about having to be a 3rd-year student; you just needed to be enrolled in school to apply.

So I applied. The bonus here was that I would be competing against the 3rd-year students at whom the program was targeted. I had finished a 16-month internship at a Fortune 500 company the year before, basically working as an engineer. My application would stand out from the crowd. Jobs were based on application only with no interview. As they say, I was bringing a gun to a knife fight.

I applied because I didn’t want to move home after I graduated. After living away for three years, I didn’t want to go back. It wasn’t about traveling the world or a grand adventure—it was about a security net. There are some key lessons I learned from this.

• Career Lesson #1: Applying for a job less than your qualifications makes you stand out from the crowd. Being overqualified is a good thing.
• Life Lesson #1: Backup or Plan Bs are a good thing. Don’t put all your hopes on one plan.

The Danish Dilemma

My placement took me to Denmark. Growing up in a town of 700 people and going to a university city of 200,000, I was not prepared for what was next. I got off the train with my sponsor, who promptly walked into the Red Light District where I was to live with three women the same age as me.

Let’s hear it for Plan B.

Now, here is where I really wish I could turn back time. Being an introvert and relatively shy, my social life to this time was spotty. I had an on-again, off-again girlfriend back home who happened to be “on” again. We were not on a path to marriage, but I was secure in the status quo and did not want things to change—mostly out of fear.

Here I had moved across the planet into a social circle with people of my own age.   There were 70 other students on the IAESTE program from around the world who were in the same situation as I was.   These were young, beautiful, very smart, and full of life of people having a fantastic adventure away from home.  They were there for a good time not a long time.

Dumb I was.  I should have read the tea leaves on what this time period of my life should have been.  Don’t get me wrong, I had a good time.  I should have been having the time of my life.  Keeping the on again off again girl friend was a mistake

• Life Lesson #2: Take advantage of opportunities. Let go of security.

Or if someone lays gold at your feet, pick it up. Idiot

The Math Problem

After smiling non-stop for a few days about my good fortune, I had to go to work. I was at an Airport Support Company that designed airplane de-icers, catering lifts, and trucks that emptied the airplane toilets. My job was to design a miniature toilet truck for very small planes—basically an ATV with a flatbed, tanks,  and pumps.

The pay was student wages but that was perfect as I was living like a student (which is fantastic by the way).

On my first day, my supervisor handed me a book for equations on pressure vessels. In shock, I realized I was staring at my dreaded Fluid Dynamics textbook from 3rd year. The scream could be heard miles away.

They say you never use what you learn in school – I wish

I considered this my first real engineering job. I was designing something! Holy crap! Over the eight months, I had a lot of fun, but I learned one or two critical lessons: I was creative with ways around problems, but I hated checking my work. I would rush headlong into a solution, only to step back a week later, check the formulas from the textbook,  check the math, and find a mistake.

When you are trying to squeeze a ton of equipment into the smallest space possible you don’t want to find a math error that makes you go back to step 1.  I found I was really good at this.  Finding my own mistake and starting over, and over, and over.  Let’s just say 8 months in I had good concepts but could never get the math to work with all the constraints.

• Career Lesson #2: Vader does not like low-level detail-oriented work.
• Career Lesson #3: Vader does not want to be a mechanical designer—ever.

The Inflection Point

At the 8-month mark, I got a call from the company where I had done my internship.  They had not hired me when I graduated because I was graded somewhere in the middle of the pack of all their internship students.  But the company had dug a hole in one of the processes I was an expert in. 

If I had learned Life Lesson #2, I wouldn’t have taken the job. But because I was security-motivated, and it was a well-paying job back home where my girlfriend was, I took the path of least resistance.  Even then I knew the job in North America was not going to thrill me.  If I had turned it down, I may never have come back to North America.

• Life Lesson #3: There are only a few big inflection points in life. Really think about them and don’t always take the path of least resistance.

So, with a job offer in hand, I was off to my first well-paid engineering job back in North America.

A Jedi would never have taken the easy path