Finding my career has been, rather than a singleness of purpose, a series of steps (and sometimes stumbles) in the right direction.
I was a huge Disney fan through high school, and would draw animated characters in every corner of my notebooks. I was also a straight-A student who did better in science classes than any others. I initially wanted to be an animator, but my parents pushed me in the science direction, fearing I’d never be able to make money as an artist. In retrospect, I am glad they did, as drawing remains a fun hobby to me rather than a deep and passionate pursuit.
I majored in chemistry in college, thinking I would be a doctor. I got not-so-great grades, which made me think maybe I should consider grad school in chemistry instead, since medical schools are much stricter about grades. But when I had to do an undergraduate thesis, I realized I’m not cut out for lab work. So, I applied for every job under the sun, not knowing what I wanted to do, and ended up getting a management trainee position at a mail-order products firm. After a few months there I realized I hated just about everything about the job (which was mostly project management), and that the one bit that I did enjoy was the writing (yes, I derived pleasure from writing something so cheesy as a letter asking the customer to buy yet another die-cast miniature truck, and that sort of thing). So I tried to get a writing job. I flooded journalism outlets with my resume, but didn’t get any bites. Then I was offered a job doing writing for a summer camp, of all places. I took it, figuring any writing job was better than none.
I was miserable at the camp job, because the writing was boring (Lots! Of exclamation points! Praising! Children! For! Unimpressive! Achievements!). I took a journalism class, hoping to get some clips and get a job at a newspaper or magazine, but still no luck.
About five years ago the departmental administrator from the chemistry department at Princeton, who was like a mother figure to us students and remembered me as someone who enjoyed writing (I infinitely preferred writing my thesis to doing the lab work!), told me she’d heard of a freelance opportunity to ghostwrite medical journal articles for a professor who was too busy to write them himself. I tried it out and LOVED it. I had never heard of medical writing as a career path before, but as I did more work for the lab, I realized I enjoyed it more than any other work I’d done before. I tried to get a job at a medical advertising agency, but was turned down due to lack of experience. So I stayed at the awful camp job, picking up as much freelance medical writing and advertising work on the side as I could. It led to 60-70 hour workweeks, but I finally felt like I was on the right path.
About a year after that I moved to Pittsburgh to follow my then-fiance. A large medical society is headquartered there, and they were seeking an editor. I applied for the job with not-so-high hopes, because I’d been turned down for similar jobs in New York before due to lack of experience. But the talent pool in Pittsburgh is much smaller, I passed the application test with flying colors, and got the job. I started out editing, but as soon as they found out I could write, they had me doing that too.
Several months later, the same advertising agency in NYC that hadn’t been interested in me before was looking for editors and writers. This time, even though I only had a few months’ experience on paper, that experience was in the therapeutic area they were looking for, and they offered me the job. I took it, in the process dumping my ex-fiance (something I should have done far earlier), and now here I am in medical advertising. In retrospect, if I had known about this career path earlier, I probably would have started on this path before I did. I’ve always had a deep love of words and I’ve always enjoyed learning about scientific advances, if not actually doing the lab work myself, and this career path allows me to do both.
Of course, in parallel I’ve also been growing as a crossword puzzlemaker, and I get a deep pleasure out of doing crossword work on the side. It doesn’t pay well enough at the moment to make me quit my day job (which I do enjoy, as I’ve said), but if I’m ever offered, say, the crossword editorship of a major paper, then I wouldn’t hesitate for an instant in making it my full-time job!
