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My dad was a jazz musician and the only career advice I got from him (late 1950s, early 1960s) was "Don't do what I did, get your college degree" and "Don't become a professional musician, it'll break your heart".
MY dad said to me once if I didn't want to get married and have kids, what did I want to do? IF he was alive he'd be 101. Had me when he was 42.
My dad would be 98 this year if he were still alive. He was 49 when I was born. I was the middle child.
The Aunts were of an entirely different era. Button up shoes. Black dresses. Lace. Antimacassars. Hats and veils, even. Victorian to the bone. They were very elderly then, long gone by now.
Still, the ideas they espoused were not out of line with, shall we say, more contemporaneous kin. My dad and my grandmother and great-grandmother were the only relatives who didn't find me puzzling at best, more like shocking most of the time, LOL!
Well, maybe they found me puzzling at times as well. But if so, they certainly didn't tell me about it.
My dad suggested I be a teacher, nurse or secretary. Pretty sure those were the only occupations he thought a woman could do. Thankfully, I didn't listen.
Those are all stable jobs with (mostly) good employment prospects. Please don't diss these careers just because they are female-dominated. The women who work those jobs are going to have the last laugh.
Those are all stable jobs with (mostly) good employment prospects. Please don't diss these careers just because they are female-dominated. The women who work those jobs are going to have the last laugh.
PUH-LEAZ! Teaching jobs are low-pay high-stress nearly everywhere in the USA. Also you must subject yourself to the paternalistic oversight (even if they're women) of "principles" who are usually overpaid dodos. I substituted for awhile when my son was in high school. SO glad I avoided that pitfall.
And secretaries these days are also low-paid. IN fact they have ALWAYS been relatively low paying.
Not really a viable career these days anyway. In the "good ole" days, it was an invitation to be pawed by your boss and all his buddies. It still puts you at higher risk of abuse even today because of lingering stereotypes of screwing your way through the secretarial pool. A secretarial job in a university setting is not usually too awful - but there aren't many of those jobs these days, and not all universities are equally nice to their rank and file any more.
Nursing today is not what it was in years past. The best paying jobs go to folks with a BS degree in nursing - which is a 5 year degree at some institutions. RNs and especially LPNs are not nearly as well situated.
A better choice would be a PA or NP position. Both NP and PA programs require a BS degree before applying and are 2 year programs.
Most PA positions pay higher than NP positions even though they are virtually identical programs. When you consider the fact that most NPs are women and most PAs are men, you might be able to guess as to the reason why that is.
Options which can be completed more quickly include any number of lab positions or "assistant" programs - 18 mos or less for some - such as "surgical assistant" and the like. (Surgical tech, btw, is different than surgical assistant - the tech lays out instruments and sterilizes things and such, but a surgical assistant actually performs some surgery under supervision, such as closing or tying whatnots off etc)
There are DOZENS of tech positions at hospitals. Lots of stuff that nurses used to do are now done by techs, even including blood draws sometimes, but certainly things such as testing blood, x-ray and other imaging techs, EEG techs, ECG techs, ad infinitum. Lots of choices BESIDES "nurse".
The reason women were guided to those careers was because they were ALL "caretaker" positions. And they were all low paid positions. Funneling women into them was just another way to keep us "in our place".
Nursing is the only one that pays halfway decently today, and that with some serious caveats about hours, overtime, shift changes, and the type of licensure you have.
Nursing's a great job but you couldn't pay me enough to be a teacher, no way in heck I'd do it for what teachers actually get paid. Secretarial work sounds horribly boring.
My parents wanted me to be an accountant just like them. I became an engineer. My mom thought engineering was too risky. For some reason she thought engineers were constantly getting laid off and chronically unemployed. I've never been laid off and the only time I've been unemployed was the year I took off after cashing out a bunch of stock options.
I decided I was going to be a lawyer when I was 7 so my family never had to recommend a career for me. And yes, all these years later, I am a lawyer, and while I've reinvented myself professionally a few times (in law, but different areas of practice), I'm in a job I really enjoy and all things being equal, would hope to retire from in another 15ish years.
Grandma recommended I become a vet and sent me Time Life zoology books to encourage me. I did choose to study science in junior college but it didn't work out. I had a job walking dogs and pet sitting for a few years when I was younger and just love animals, stopping on the street when I see particularly cute dog breeds. I ended up choosing another career.
Nothing in particular, I thought I wanted to be a Vet but Chemistry and Cell & Molecular Bio changed my mind in a hurry. From there I defaulted into a business degree.
Growing up, he always placed a really heavy emphasis on us doing well in Math, including paying for tutors outside of school to develop those skills from an early age. I'm competent at math, but not capable of majoring in it and would likely struggle with the calculations required for an engineering degree. One of my brothers is truly talented at math, majoring in it in college. My youngest brother is probably about as capable as I am. Actually, he's better at remembering how to figure things and how to enter it into a program of one kind or another, so he's more capable in a practical sense but not intellectually. That's a long way of saying that he wanted to prepare us for an engineering or scientific career if we wanted to go that direction.
My Dad suggested, (I wouldn't say pushed) law school, on a couple of occasions. However, it didn't seem like the prospects for lawyers (outside of top programs) justified the time and money. I still think it would have been neat to go into Criminal defense.
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IF he was alive he'd be 101. Had me when he was 42.
