How to make a career decision? IT – Economics – PR – IT back again (personal case study)

You should read this post if your interested in my ways of hard learning on what a career decision should look like. I’ll go very personal and beyond that. If you’re interested on ways to take a better career decision, read on. You can also directly jump to (the) conclusions. This blog post is not long. It’s just detailed.

Contents
1. 1991-1997 period
2. 1997-2001 time frame
3. 2001-2005 period
4. 2005-2008 period
5. Conclusions

1. 1991-1997 period. I’ve had my first computing unit (they called it Home Computer, but looking backwards it didn’t seem as too much of a computer) in 1991, when I was only 9 years old. I’ve manually typewritten lots and lots of “games” (very very rudimentary) on the HC91 (you had to type a program in order to make it work; so instead of running Microsoft Word, you had to program it each time you wanted to run it; for a lot of time I couldn’t save a game or program I’ve just written, and when I was finally able to, saving on cassette recorder was slow). 6 years later (1997, I was 15) I was writing my first advanced game, based on a game seen on a real-life PC. I didn’t got to end writing the game. The same year when my family sells the HC and I’m one of the first on my street to own a PC (it had 4 MB of RAM and a hard drive of about 100 MB). The switch from Basic programming, even if it was to Windows 3.11 and Norton Commander, seemed a huge step. I was like WOW. The next year, 1998, I upgrade my PC and switch to Windows 95 (again, I was stunned to see what it was capable of). What’s a characteristic of this period is the fact that I’ve spent a lot of time in front of a computing unit and I was very fond of it. Even now, when I think of Windows, I still use a lot of skills learned in Windows 95. I still know MS-Dos command lines very well.

2. 1997-2001 time frame. My first career decision comes in the middle of 1997. I had a personal model in life in a Romanian writer (my first life model, and the only one I’ve given up to; I won’t mention it here, because it’s a negative reference). Anyhow, when he was about my age he went to a social sciences high-school, and it seemed obvious for me: if I want to follow its steps exactly, I’d had to take a social sciences high school myself. Bizarre or not, I didn’t care about what I wanted to do, I just wanted to do the right thing in life. My parents strongly opposed a social high-school in a large city nearby, and I decided it’s best to follow their advice and go to an Informatics class in my small town (the Informatics class in almost all classes gathered most of the best pupils; they were the elite classes; this does not imply that the high school itself was an elite too). Did I love the Informatics class? Oh, yes: beautiful times. I learned a lot of things on programming, I was programming myself at home, writing small programs (like the size of this blog post), and loved what one could do with software. By 2001 software and computers were my most important hobby. In the first three years of the high school my career path was simple: I’ll do programming. Looking back on the first career decision (picking a high-school), it was better to follow what I liked best (and this was also what my parents noticed), and don’t just imitate the decisions of a writer at the end of the XIX century (anyhow, I doubt that there was an Informatics class in 1890).

The last year of high school comes and my father makes this affirmation: you’re good on PCs and you’re good with English (the latter was not necessarily true), but in order to be a manager, it’s best that you know some Economics and do an Economics faculty. The reasoning is rather faulty: in order to be a manager it’s best that you do an MBA, no matter what a faculty you do. And doing an Economics faculty is not-that-much of a good preparation for the tasks of a manager. But at that time Economics was a wonder field to me, and little did I know about it. So I enter the final year of the high school with a dilemma: should I follow my passion and do IT, or should I do what I thought was right and do Economics? Due to the way the school-leaving examination was made and the way University exams were made, preparing for both IT and Economics was natural. Thus, I could and actually did postpone the decision with no damage. Another decision was in which county to study. I trusted the opinions of two Informatics teachers in my high-school when they said “The capital of Romania is best: largest city, best opportunities, not-as-bad education”. So I favored Bucharest due to their advice. Two weeks before the exams on the Universities, after my school-leaving examination was done, I am faced with this observation (which was in my head long before this): PC monitors affect eyesight due to intense concentration and due to the fact that at that time most monitors were CRT (see Health concerns on CRT on Wikipedia web site). I put health before everything and say: I won’t do IT due to the fact that I already have some eye problems and working all day on the PC would damage my eyesight. Economics was a better alternative and after 4 years of Informatics forgetting it all and going from scratch didn’t look bad. I never actually thought: what I like, what I’m best at, what I should do. The logic was: in order to make money, you should better be a manager (actually careers can go into being a specialist with no human management tasks also). In order to be a manager, one should know IT (and I was good at it, at least for the requirements of a managerial position), English (pretty OK), and Economics (now I think one manager should know Economics almost just as much as it should know other fields in the company directly involved with his activity, like marketing, human resources, law). More than this, Economics is not as necessary for a manager as a MBA, which can be taken after any faculty. Finally, since my only obvious lack of knowledge was in the field of Economics, I thought I should do an Economics faculty (this was actually an OK motive). Looking at a list of faculties in the Academy of Economic Studies in Bucharest (just at the list, nothing on curriculum), I liked International Business and Economics most: not only I will study Economics, but also English. Unfortunately, foreign languages in the Academy of Economic Studies were studied from a business perspective, so I could only improve my business vocabulary, not the general language level. Also, I missed the fact that International Economics means that you won’t generally study the economy of country, or the management of a company, or do accounting, or trade. Instead, most of the courses have been on International Economy (so between institutions in different countries or between different countries). It’s that simple, but at that time it didn’t seem so obvious. So picking the faculty was faulty even for study Economics. Four years later, I could say that from the faculties in the Academy of Economic Studies it was the best option for me, so two wrongs (learn English & learn economics – both bad) can make it a right. After I picked a field, I applied only for International Business and Economics faculties in three regions of Romania and I was lucky enough to be admitted to all. I could pick a faculty where I was already given a scholarship (in Constanta, a city nearby my small town residence), or I could go to Bucharest, where the competition would be fierce (no scholarship in there). Iasi had no scholarship for me, also no real competition, but it was just at the other side of world. I followed my previous Informatics’ teachers advice and went for Bucharest.

3. 2001-2005 period. Four years in the Faculty fly fast when you’re in an NGO (after 5 failed admission interviews to other NGOs), go to every imaginable event for a lot of time (conferences, seminars, fairs, theatrical plays), and basically you leave the hostel in the morning and get home each day after 21 (this was not the typical daily routine of a unemployed student). All the four years I was hungry to learn: read on psychology, talk whenever possible, improve communication skills, all-in-all understand the world. Now we’re in 2005. In the forth year of the Faculty, one month before the graduation exam, I get a job at a consultancy company (with a clear picture in my head that even if I don’t like numbers, at least I’ll know what it’s like). After the graduation exam, I stay with them for two more months and I convince myself that whatever my preparation in Economics was, I will avoid numbers and especially accounting or finance.

During the last months of the Faculty I have to take a decision: which should my career path be? A small parenthesis. After reading things on psychology, I liked what I’ve read on ADHD. According to Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder page on NINDS web site, these are some simptoms of ADHD that felt really close to my behaviour:
1. “Impulsive children seem unable to curb their immediate reactions or think before they act. They will often blurt out inappropriate comments, display their emotions without restraint, and act without regard for the later consequences of their conduct.” [ You will really not believe the things I can say out loud ]
2. “Children who are inattentive have a hard time keeping their minds on any one thing and may get bored with a task after only a few minutes. If they are doing something they really enjoy, they have no trouble paying attention. But focusing deliberate, conscious attention to organizing and completing a task or learning something new is difficult.” [ Felling asleep at theatrical plays, unable to remember anything from most faculty class where I was just present, unable to follow up with someone's speech, unable to read a book, any book - these were all common to me ]
3. “Homework is particularly hard for these children. They will forget to write down an assignment, or leave it at school. They will forget to bring a book home, or bring the wrong one. The homework, if finally finished, is full of errors and erasures. Homework is often accompanied by frustration for both parent and child.” [ This has accompanied me all of my life, I have even seen all of these errors in a winter school in February 2008; but most of them were drastically reduced; I mean, having an email address just to help me be aware that I forget things - deneuitat - clearly helped me avoid this problem ]

What I liked most on ADHD was reading something like this:
“There is no “cure” for ADHD. Children with the disorder seldom outgrow it; however, some may find adaptive ways to accommodate the ADHD as they mature.” (from the NINDS Attention Deficit-Hyperactivity Disorder Information Page). Adaptive behavior. Things can change with behavior. So beautiful put. (I didn’t like the solution of going into medication at all)

Please note that I may have been wrong with my analysis on whether I have ADHD or not. I could also have the “Medical students’ disease” (see the Wikipedia entry on Medical students’ disease). So everything could just be in my imagination. I found out about ADHD sometime in 2002/2003. Back then it was the WOW factor. “It must be true! Everything fits so nicely.” When I look now at the symptoms, most of them don’t fit the description. I can now read a book, I can follow almost anybody’s speech if I really want to, I don’t move all the time when sitting down, and all-in-all I have much lower resemblance to the patterns in there. But the ADHD helped me a lot in identifying some weak points in my behavior and working on them.

So, what would a perfect job and career be then for me (a thought-to-be ADHD)? Something that I wouldn’t get bored doing, something that would really get me involved (due to ADHD symptoms). I looked at all the skills I’ve had, and I reasoned like this: I love doing IT, I have some knowledge on Economics-related field, and I’m very low on human skills. I took the non-boring, totally paradoxical, and WOW-factor solution of going into a job on human skills: communication and public relations. Exactly what my weakest point was. More than this, I’ve chosen a career path that would definitely provoke me: I thought back then that I could learn how to control what I say and be a good diplomat. Alternatively put, doing public relations was my way of doing an almost impossible thing like climbing mountains: my poorest skills were in communication (although I have already tried working on that), and my life philosophy was nothing on saying good things in the good way (and I tought I could change this: I will still say bad things, but in a good way; back then I thought that PR was on the way you say something, not on what you say; and I would later found out that method of saying something very nicely was mostly advertising).

4. 2005-2008 period. So, for the next two and a half years I did a Masters’ in Communication and Public Relations, I had two jobs in Customer Service (three months each), and one in both Internet Marketing and Public Relations (for one year). Time flew slower when having to work repetitive tasks, but two and a half years passed. In February 2008 I graduate my Masters’. Now it’s time for a new evaluation.

1. First, the graduation itself: I had to create a 60 pages (I did 90) graduation thesis and then present it to a commission. My supervising teacher told me that she insisted to the commission that I should get a maximum grade for the quality of writing (so not the page numbers). Now an interesting aspect: the commission also insisted that my presentation skills were not-as-good as my thesis itself. Then I think: hey, you enter a Masters’ in Communication and at the end you can’t communicate. Sure, you speak nicely about it, you can give reasons in a talk, you like the philosophy of speaking but still: after studying communication two years, exactly your real-life communications skills drag you down. What’s the use of a Masters’ to you?
2. I organize (and that’s a good PR skill) a meeting like this: an event organizer and a head hunter gave me a virtual interview. In the room there are students interested in HR field. Also present is a HR specialist (with experience in multinational companies). I present my CV, I go to the fake interview, everybody gives me feedback on my behavior and way of reacting to the questions. The positive opinions on my performance were: whenever questioned, I presented the situation in such a way that although I spoke a lot, I don’t answer the question directly (it was mentioned as a negative performance, but this is actually a PR skill, or so I think) and also a positive opinion was the fact that I’ve organized the very interview (although this was not mentioned). But most of the other feed-back was negative, and it focused on: soft skills, and technical skills (understanding the way I should organize an event). I didn’t care about the technical skills (it’s easy to learn how to organize an event), but the soft skills worried me (learn how to move your hands according to what I say; I went like: HUH?). Now if this feed-back came back in the summer of 2005, I would have said: OK, I can improve this, I know there are many things to work on. But now we’re in February 2008, and in the meantime I’ve played a lot of theatre, I’ve done sports, and I’ve had a lot of trouble thinking on ways to improve my communication skills and acting on those ways. Surely, these skills can still be improved, but it’s a question mark the fact that in two and a half years of self-improvement for soft skills I basically suck at communication. Coming back to the fake interviewed, I focused on the HR specialist’s opinion, and since he wouldn’t tell me if PR is right for me or not after just a small interview, I asked for things to improve upon, and he gives a reply via email with things that I was already doing (so for years I’ve been doing it right, but the results were still small);
3. A winter school in February 2008 puts me in a team of 5 and we work on projects. With time for me to think and analyze things, I see a conflict between this thinking: “One should focus on the positive things, and although it should say all truth, it should not say everything, but just some good stuff” (basic rule of PR, or so I think), and my life principles, which, adapted to PR, would sound something like: “Don’t focus on your own (or company’s) interests, focus on the customer’s interests. If these interests make you recommend to your clients the product of the competition, then you should do that. If these interests say in public that your company’s core business is not as good or efficient for the client as an alternative business, then you should also say it”. This was much more than learning how to control the way to say things (which I thought in the summer of 2005 was one weak point of mine). PR is saying just some things, in a good way. And mostly focus on what’s cool and nice and OK. I found out in the winter school that this is just not like me. The problem was with personal values, not with the way one makes a thing look better or worse. Getting back to the winter school. After a conflict in the final days of the camp, which didn’t have an obvious cause to me, I decide to ask for feed-back on my behavior from some colleague participants. I received mostly negative feed-back. Some focused on soft skills, some on ethics, but I already knew most of that (the feed-back itself was, nevertheless, valuable). What I found most striking on the winter camp was a personal negative feeling to a general harmony in the social communication. A peaceful, happy, joyful atmosphere is just not for me. This discovery took into account a lot of past examples, not only on the camp itself. What’s PR? It’s exactly on creating a peaceful atmosphere between humans. Most of the time PR is just that: there’s a conflict, make it go peacefully. My way of acting is exactly the opposite: create a conflict to solve a problem. Surely, there are arguments and conflicts in PR, but most of the time you just have to keep a peaceful relation. As said, that’s in conflict with my conviction that conflict leads to improvement. So two discoveries in the winter camp: I do not view public relations’ way of saying mostly positive things in a totally positive way as a good thing for my self-expression and peaceful talks and me don’t mix;
4. In March 2008 I talk to quite a few persons in PR and I confront them them about these two premises: “PR is all about peace” (it’s mostly true, in their opinion), “PR is on saying true things, but mostly positive” (I think they would say true, but no clear answer was given). And one person gives me a reasoning for the “say only positive things”: you don’t say positive things, you are just so much impersonating with the company, that the true things are mostly positive (OK, and probably you control a few others). Anyhow, it was an argument that if I have the urge to say mostly negative things about a company, then (again) there is a problem between the values of the company and mine: it’s not normal to work for a company for which you see mostly bad things. Then I think: what company and institutions I would recommend as great? Google, GMP (Romanian advertising & PR company; I mostly like them for their works, this generally does not extend to their clients, except, say, Itsy Bitsy radio) are fine, but most of the people from Obor marketplace (in Bucharest, Romania) are great. These are the companies or institutions I would present nicely in perfect accordance to my values. Not a very long list to work for in PR. Again, a problem on personal values: I can’t fit with any organization’s values. Creating financial reports for a company you don’t value 100% may be fine, but being the voice of that company with the external world can lead to problems.

So, my third switch comes around February 24, 2008, and I’m back to the one field I love: IT. What happened to the
eye-problem issue? Well, according to a study focusing on things is actually good for some eye conditions. More than this, TFT displays are now common-place. I could have chosen IT back in the 2005, but it was just not challenging enough.

You should expect that after doing an Informatics high-school, worked in an IT company for more than a year, and basically be very good Internet, I would clearly know what I want to do in IT. Unfortunately, since 2001 I’ve constantly blocked any thought of “How would it be if I worked in this field of IT?” I just didn’t let it in: “This is a no-no”. So right now I have to short-circuit all these thoughts and make a decision. But I’m in no hurry. I can identify what I like most (and Internet obviously pops-up), and I can work on that. Right now there’s no urgent reason to make a decisive decision. I also have to think on way to get a more formal education than a high-school in IT. Time for that too. Romain Gary (with pseudonim of Émile Ajar)’s novel “La vie devant soi” was translated into Romanian something like “You have all your life ahead of you”. That’s my feeling in March 2008. Plenty of time for IT.

5. Conclusions:
1. Put your values above everything. My 2001 conflict was due to a change on priorities via health issues. My 2008 conflict was a conflict with PR on values again. I couldn’t do anything when faced with values problems;
2. Doing something you are not good at may be challenging, but it may also be unwise. Almost everything can be improved, but you may find it something just not worth the time and effort;
3. Investing in deciding a career path may be a good target by itself (there are counselors who will advise you on picking a right career);
4. Put a lot of questions to authoritative persons. An authority may be working in HR, may be a specialist in your field, or may just know the situation well (to know whether to study in Bucharest or not, for example);
5. (I don’t follow this) Create a written plan for improvement;
6. Anything you do, love it.

Any comment on my personal case study? Post it below, please.