Figures.

My Top 3

The Wall Street Journal (the only remaining respectable paper in the country), has a very interesting Best and Worst Jobs article out today.  I find it particularly interesting because my winding career path to law took me through five possible professions.  Each of the five are in the top 20, law is not:

The survey, as explained in the article, combines working conditions, job prospects, salary and other criteria to determine which job is the best.  Topping the list is Mathematician.  This is the job my high school guidance counselor said I should pursue.  I’m not kidding.  I didn’t want to be a mathematician because it was too easy and wasn’t much fun.  (Yes, I realize how obnoxious that sounds, but it’s true.)

Further down the list at number 4, is Biologist (I’m presuming this includes molecular biologist).  As a high school senior, I was offerred a full scholarship by C.W. Post along with an offer to work at the Cold Spring Harbor Lab.  CSHL was (and still is) at the forefront of molecular biology.  I turned them down, because, again, biology was boring to me.

Slipping further down the list is Physicist.  This is the subject in which I earned by B.S. at the University at Stony Brook (at the time, more prestigious than MIT for Physics).  But again, didn’t want to do that.  And just barely making it, at number 20, was one of my minors at Stony Brook, astronomy (ironically, I had to drop Astronomy as a minor because I could not make the early morning classes, having been up all night at the observatory–again, true story).

In any event, I planned on going straight to law school from Stony Brook, but a good friend and professor convinced me instead to go the graduate school where I earned my M.S. in…Atmospheric Physics, which brings us to number 15 on the list (Meteorologist).

So there you have it.  I have meandered through five of the top twenty best occupations to land at one that, quite frankly, I don’t know anyone who is happy doing.  Maybe I should stop giving people career advice.