Whenever my good friend Adelaide and I were feeling particularly distressed about how we’d ever manage to get through MIT and make it into the real world and if we even really wanted to make it into the real world, we’d add a few entries to a list entitled “Laura and Adelaide’s Ridiculously Improbable List of Future Plans.” This was where we encoded such dream professions as “teacher,” “wedding planner,” “UN something or other” and “one of Santa’s elves.” Whenever another passion of ours presented itself, we would shout, “Add it to the life list!” This list of possible professions was impressively long, but I’m also starting to realize that my list of real jobs is likewise growing.
In the past twelve months, I have been employed as:
1. a professional blogger
2. a math and science tutor
3. a tech support consultant
4. a lifeguard
5. a campaign staffer
6. an office clerk for the U.S. Census
Now, I will get to add:
7. an engineer (you know, the one I wanted to be in the first place).
That’s right, ladies and gentlemen, I found a job.
Sort of.
It’s less of a “job” and more of an “internship of indeterminate length depending on how well it works out and if I’m actually able to survive on what they pay me and if the company still exists in a few months.” But as we’ve seen, I’m not really a huge fan of stability, so that’s cool with me.
How did I find this job? Funny you should ask. Basically, back before I started giving the U.S. Census 40 hours a week to feast on my soul and happiness, I was puzzling over how to figure out how to even find out about jobs I might potentially want. I spent a lot of time putting every variation of “sustainable international development engineering” I could think of into Google. Somewhere along the way, I stumbled across the website http://www.lightingafrica.org. I can’t really figure out what the website is (it’s some sort of UN-funded initiative, but I can’t really put my finger on what it is they actually do), but what I do know is that it has a directory of companies who seem to be saying “Hey, my company does something that is in some vague way related to the goal of bringing artificial light to Africa.” This was the closest proxy I could find for my dream job (which is probably best described as “saving the world through engineering,” which I realize is pretty vague, so you know, I guess I understand why there isn’t an online directory for that). So I went through all 2,000 companies listed in their member directory and sorted out the cool ones. (I mean, I really had a lot of time on my hands.) Eventually I had a list of 100 or so companies that seemed cool, in no particular order.
The first spot on the list happened to fall to an organization called Mechanical Electric, which is developing a device which can store energy mechanically, with the goal of making renewable energies more reliable. Well, there’s no better place to start than the beginning. So I sent them an email and basically said, “Hey, can I have a job?” I start in two weeks.
Yeah, I can’t really believe that worked either.
Granted, it wasn’t quite that easy. I first emailed them in about December or January, and they said they didn’t really have the money to hire me, but to check back before the summer. So I emailed them again a few weeks ago, and they still didn’t really have the money, but I guess took pity on the MIT grad still unable to find a job. In the meantime, I sent similar emails to a few dozen other companies from the list with varying degrees of success. Obviously nothing came of that in the end, but there were some near successes. The problem with wanting to save the world is that, for some odd reason, there’s not a lot of money in it. Most efforts to save the world are shoestring operations done for glory rather than profit. Which again, I’m totally cool with, but a girl’s gotta eat.
So, I’ll be moving out to the Bay Area, staying with one of my good friends from college (and within spitting distance of another 10 good friends…I know more people in San Fran than in New Jersey, oddly), and doing really, really cool stuff.
Of course, that might only last for the summer, at which point I’ll hopefully be heading to Mexico for this cool master’s program I’ve been applying to, or else starting all over again trying to find a “real” job.
Like I said, stability is overrated.