Careers and Salary

Money, one of the most limiting and most talked about factor of our daily lives.Money is what buys food, water, shelter, and luxury. Money can also lead to crippling debt and personal economic depression as well.Money is what makes people work and provide for others, but money is also what makes people steal and scam. So, with money being this important, how is it earned the moral way? Traditionally, the answer to that question has been education from elementary school through college.

Is it a surprise ,then, that some people would rather do what they love to get their degree instead of getting a degree in a job field that’s renowned for having high wages? Maybe or maybe not, but it just shows that salary usually has little or no effect on what area a person decides to major in. For instance, I want to get my degree in aerospace engineering. I’ve been fascinated with flight all my life: how it works, what it does, and what it can do for us as humans. So, when I heard there was a job to literally study the workings of air and spacecraft while also adding my own innovative ideas to the mix (I can’t quite remember if I shouted or said it to myself, more than likely I burst out in joy since I was 7 at the time) I said, immediately, “That’s what I’m going to be when I grow up!” Ever since then I’ve been focusing my education path on that road, while also dabbling in other subjects a little less related as well, unflinchingly. It was only until the 8th grade when I realised why my grandparents and parents were saying I was taking on a great ambition with that last statement. When we did the Future Fair (or whatever it was called) they had us calculate our future wages as entry-class workers in our projected majors so we could have a base starting amount for our yearly payments on life’s necessities and luxuries. When I entered “Aerospace Engineer” in the search results, I was surprised. At entry-level, the program said I would be making $94,000 a year! I then looked around and found that everyone was looking at my screen, absolutely dumbfounded (since the highest salary out of all of them was around $60,000 a year). The people around me then began of accusing me of “picking the job with the most money” and “not following my passion in life”, to which I simply assured them that this was what I wanted to do ever since I was a 7-year old and that I, in fact, had no idea what aerospace engineers made until now. They then apologetically retracted their comments and even congratulated me, but I never, at the time, really understood why. I’m being congratulated for following my dreams? Wasn’t everyone doing the same thing I was doing? Then I realized, they weren’t congratulating me for following my dreams, they were congratulating me for doing that AND having a high salary to go with it.

So, in short, salary had no effect on me choosing a career. The only thing that ever affected my choice of a career was just my childhood fascinations and my ambitious nature to pursue those fascinations into something greater and much larger than I was (at the time).