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# Dream career In one of my entries from yesterday I was talking about how I wasn't really all that interested in doing any sort of EE work in aerospace because I didn't really see the point. (Except also I was in a super-excited mood to just kinda dump everything out so maybe that wasn't too coherent. IDK. Brain stuff is weird.) So what kind of career *would* I want? I guess a better place to start would be to step back a little bit and ask what I want out of a career. Because if I'm going to be doing something for a significant chunk of my life, it damn better well be something I want to do. Right now I'm an electrical engineer, specializing in embedded systems. That's what my resume says, anyways, because it's the closest to the professional experience I have and the general sorta stuff I'm interested in. I mean *heck*, summer of 2018 I was working on a Game Boy game. For fun! And I did a whole lotta embedded programming with that space satellite project. But as I mentioned in the last entry, *emotions* have rather suddenly become a VITAL part in how I see and experience the world. A big part of the reason why I went down the EE path *at all* was because I was super duper into old computers when I was younger. Growing up I didn't really have much besides video games and my old 1999 HP computer to keep me entertained. Trying to hang out with someone felt nigh-on-impossible to coordinate, I didn't have a lot of friends in school (turns out emotional connections are important for friendships, who would've thunk?) and my parents didn't really have the money for me to chase down hobbies. But I could always play some Mario on the DS, and I could always turn on the computer and fiddle with Microsoft Frontpage or The Games Factory or Windows Movie Maker or whatever. So, naturally, I just kept going further and further down that rabbithole. I didn't want to just use my computer to write Mario fanfiction, I wanted to know how it *ticked*, how to make my *own* Mario games. And my dad had a bunch of computer programming books lying around the house because of his job, so I just *devoured* those and never really stopped tinkering. It was the Sonic hacking scene that *really* got me interested in going even deeper. Making my own Sonic game running on old hardware was something that I was really interested in, never mind the fact that I never owned a Mega Drive growing up. (had a SNES though, that was fun.) So I downloaded the disasm and the tools and fiddled about for a bit and never really got anywhere but still had the deep down appreciation. And then the whole Sonic R thing happened (I wrote an article about it, not gonna rehash) and while I'm not *against* diving back into ROM hacking, I'm realizing there's probably much better uses of my time. At the very least I could be throwing that effort into an original IP like the devs of Freedom Planet and Spark the Electric Jester did. Going back to the original topic of careers... the only reason I went down the EE path was because that's what I knew, and that's what I was interested in. I wanted to make a very good Sonic game as a kid, and here we are, I'm 4 years into a degree with at least 1 or 2 left to go because the college transfer ate some of my credit hours and I'm starting to flounder in classes because of a combination of burnout and ADHD and blegh. I don't hate programming and I don't hate computers and I don't hate electronics. They're all very neat, and I'm glad I learned what I did about them. But *for the rest of my life*? Really? At this point I'm so far in the hole in student loan debt that switching degrees now would be a very, VERY silly idea. And in fairness I do genuinely enjoy this sorta stuff. Solving problems, refactoring things, optimizing, planning. All very enjoyable. But there's no getting around the *outcomes* and the *ethics* of what I'm doing. If I wanted to go into aerospace, I'd be signing up to work for a defense contractor. And I dunno, I'm not particularly fond of the status quo, and I really don't think I want to devote my time and energy to helping make bombs and missiles and fighter planes to enforce the authority of capitalism and American influence on the world. (oh hey, that must be the sound of my background check failing.) So, assuming that I HAVE to be an electrical engineer, what can I do that will actually do GOOD things for humanity? ...what is good, actually? Briefly, - Helps more people than it hurts - Doesn't contribute to generating waste without SERIOUS societal benefit - Promotes decentralization and takes control away from large tech conglometates - Respects user's privacy and choices - Is customizable, hackable, repairable I suppose one field I'd really love to work in would be public transit. Go make some automated subway trains or something. I like public transit, a lot, because it allows for MORE people to do MORE things without having to take on the burden of car ownership, gasoline purchases, learning how to drive, car repair, etc. If public transit was better and you could just get on a bus or a train here and get off there and that was just how life worked, I think the world would be a better place. Granted any conversation about public transit would be incomplete without talking about how silly suburbs are and how everyone's in a strict competitive arms race against their neighbors because the current system demonizes sharing land and assets with them but I digress. Another field would be... yeah actually this is a hard question. Something farming-related? But also we got John Deer and their proprietary tractor DRM, plus I don't *particularly* have an interest in farms, so IDK. Water treatment? Infrastructure stuff? The problem with that is the same problem with the radio and the television and the internet, some big corporation will thank you for your work and then just sorta take it over and flood it with advertising and profit-squeezing and I'm not for that. If I were to reroll I might just become like a physicist or a librarian or something. I like research. I like learning new things, trying options out, and esp. with the librarian thing, helping other people. But alas, it's too late for that now. I'm stuck chasing a $80K/yr job I don't even want and, let's be honest, I'm not sure if I can even get at this point.