Sep. 6th, 2002 11:10 am
(no subject)
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muckefuckAck. Administrative crap. Oh, well, mostly done and I'm about to take a long-standing employee out to lunch to celebrate his new job.
Earlier in the week,![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
rollick asked what everyone's greatest lost opportunity was. It's impossible to say, isn't it? Great opportunities don't always advertise themselves as such and some things that look great don't pan out.
For instance, some years back, an old college friend got me an interview at the dotcom where he worked. They ended up offering to pay me twice what I was getting (plus stock options, but they had already gone public), train me in programming, and send me to London to help launch their European operations. In many ways, it looked like a tremendous opportunity. But the whole thing gave me a queasy feeling and, in the end, I decided to give it a miss.
Last year, I heard from my friend. He got laid off in the crash and was struggling to find new work while making the payments on his condo. He kept saying, "You're so lucky you didn't take that job at [company]!"
With this in mind, I still can't help but wonder what might've happened if I'd gotten a certain job after graduation. Several friends of mine were working for a promising young investment analysis firm. They tipped me off that the company was looking for someone who could read several European languages--German, French, Italian--in order to make sense of dispatches they were getting. I would've had to learn some financial terminology, but I could've easily handled it. I came in for a brief initial interview, but never got called back.
Later, when I mentioned this to one of my friends, she said that they'd recently changed personnel directors and it was quite possible they'd simply lost my application. She encouraged me to reapply. However, by that point, I'd finally found a job after an exhausting summer of searching and was in no mood. That could well have been my one chance to get in at the ground floor of Morningstar Europe that I passed up. I'm not in touch with anyone who works there anymore, so it's difficult to say.
It's a fairly sure bet things would've worked out much differently had I gotten a job there. I'd've moved to the North Side and gained acumen and interest in financial matters much sooner. I'd probably have more wealth by now. I likely would never have met my current boyfriend and might've lost touch with many other friends much sooner. I don't regret the career path I've chosen (such as it is), since it's so hard to judge between what's "better" and what's merely "different", especially when so many criteria are involved.
Earlier in the week,
rollick asked what everyone's greatest lost opportunity was. It's impossible to say, isn't it? Great opportunities don't always advertise themselves as such and some things that look great don't pan out.For instance, some years back, an old college friend got me an interview at the dotcom where he worked. They ended up offering to pay me twice what I was getting (plus stock options, but they had already gone public), train me in programming, and send me to London to help launch their European operations. In many ways, it looked like a tremendous opportunity. But the whole thing gave me a queasy feeling and, in the end, I decided to give it a miss.
Last year, I heard from my friend. He got laid off in the crash and was struggling to find new work while making the payments on his condo. He kept saying, "You're so lucky you didn't take that job at [company]!"
With this in mind, I still can't help but wonder what might've happened if I'd gotten a certain job after graduation. Several friends of mine were working for a promising young investment analysis firm. They tipped me off that the company was looking for someone who could read several European languages--German, French, Italian--in order to make sense of dispatches they were getting. I would've had to learn some financial terminology, but I could've easily handled it. I came in for a brief initial interview, but never got called back.
Later, when I mentioned this to one of my friends, she said that they'd recently changed personnel directors and it was quite possible they'd simply lost my application. She encouraged me to reapply. However, by that point, I'd finally found a job after an exhausting summer of searching and was in no mood. That could well have been my one chance to get in at the ground floor of Morningstar Europe that I passed up. I'm not in touch with anyone who works there anymore, so it's difficult to say.
It's a fairly sure bet things would've worked out much differently had I gotten a job there. I'd've moved to the North Side and gained acumen and interest in financial matters much sooner. I'd probably have more wealth by now. I likely would never have met my current boyfriend and might've lost touch with many other friends much sooner. I don't regret the career path I've chosen (such as it is), since it's so hard to judge between what's "better" and what's merely "different", especially when so many criteria are involved.