Casual Observer

Career Advice

by Mark Levy

When I was barely a teenager, as clueless about my future as most teenagers whose parents are not physicians, I took some career aptitude tests. I had always done well on academic aptitude tests that featured math problems. Notice, I said
“Well,” not “Phenomenally well.”
But even at the tender age of 13, I realized that the number of professions for which solving elementary math problems was required couldn’t be great. I mean, I had never heard of one, except for my seventh grade math teacher, and he had weird taste in neckties — weird even by math nerd standards.
Anyway, there came that point in my life when I realized I had to get serious about my future. It was stressful not knowing the direction I should be going. Not so stressful that it was affecting my appetite, of course. I wasn’t obsessed, but I was stressed enough to think about my situation every week or two. My ever-helpful parents arranged for me to take a couple of hours of aptitude tests.
Here’s the strange thing: when my test results were analyzed, the counselor recommended that I consider a career in … fashion design. Fashion design! I — who couldn’t tell the difference between culotts and mu mus and couldn’t care less — I become a fashion designer?

It wasn’t until years later that I realized the counselor was somehow motivated to direct students to attend a particular fashion school, regardless of their lack of aptitude or interest.
That experience was not entirely a waste of time, although I thought so for the last 40 years. The fact is, though, I scored highest in the subject called academic research aptitude. That’s not the same as scientific research, by the way.
In any case, I had no interest in becoming a librarian, so I filed that factoid away until recently, when I had an epiphany of sorts. It turns out I am good at academic research — research on the Internet. I look up information eight or ten times a day.
It seems like I’m confirming how words are spelled, or I’m locating appropriate synonyms every other minute.
For essays like this, I have researched not-so-famous national days, like national Talk Like a Pirate Day, and the number of people in America named Roy Rogers, and people and things whose acronym is B.S., and which famous people were born on my birthday. I’ve discovered that lobsters are related to cockroaches and that Marilyn Monroe’s last, incomplete movie, also starred Dean Martin. It was to be called, “Something’s Got to Give,” by the way, and I guess it was Marilyn’s life that was the “something.”
I use the search engine Google, and the Internet tells me that word, spelled correctly — g-o-o-g-o-l — was made popular by Edward Kasner, who used it in his book, Mathematics and the Imagination, published in 1940.
It means one followed by 100 zeroes, which is actually called ten duo-tri-gintillion, if you care.
Anyway, thanks to the Google Internet search engine, I can retrieve pretty much anything I want to know by typing is two or three words. My talent — and I have to refer to talent with a lower case “t” — comes in useful for those trivial purposes I mentioned, as well as for searching inventions on the Patent and Trademark Office database.
Of course, the Internet database didn’t exist when I was informed that I had academic research aptitude.
So even though I don’t get to solve simple math problems for a living, at least I was spared from a life of fashion design.

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http://www.jscotthardin.com/

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