Finding a Niche in the Working World

I have been thinking about this a lot lately as my children graduate from college and law school and decide what to do next. Sometimes it’s just not easy to figure out what to do with your life, especially when you are not independently wealthy. There is always this issue of balancing enjoyment of your work and making money and sometimes the two just don’t intersect.

I have recently been following the job quest of a person who lives with a good friend of mine. She is in her early 20s, she is Asian, and she has a masters degree in double bass. From high school on she trained to be a professional musician. She did all the right things to make this happen: she went to Juilliard, she went to an acclaimed school to get her masters degree. She basically never studied anything other than music.

But then she graduated and decided that she really didn’t want to spend the rest of her life playing the bass in an orchestra. She’s absolutely brilliant – she writes poetry, she’s well-read, she’s funny. But she has no other credentials.

So over the past 6 months, she has worked in a hardware store, a chocolate store, and a coffee house. None of those really worked out. She spent all day yesterday trying to apply for a job at the zoo. She told me that she was the only non-African American, the only one with more than a high school education in the pool of applicants there for the job. By the time they got to her, it was too late for an interview and they told her to come back another day.

I wonder what she will end up doing. Will it be a job just to earn money? Will she find a job in which she can advance? Will she continue to play the bass?

Getting started in life is tough!