Former Finnegan No. 2: Making the world a better place through blood donation

When I ran screaming from graduate school, my only thought was to get out. I wound up returning to the area where my family lived only because I didn't know where else to go. I got an apartment that I shared for a while with my sister and started aimlessly checking the classified ads in the newspaper.

Looking for a job when I felt like a failure (a drop out!) was disheartening, and when I  was told that I was over-educated for just about any kind of job in the "real world," I believed it. I was high-minded but forced to try to fit into a practical, workaday world where I felt ill at ease. Since I wanted to do something that would be a service to society rather than serving crass commercialism, I took a really lousy-paying job at a local non-profit community blood center as a donor recruiter. There were some things I liked about this job: giving informative and motivational speeches to businesses and organizations about the great benefits of blood donation, designing promotional materials such as posters and bumper stickers. There were also some things I loathed, such as cold-call selling to line up new donor groups.

Unfortunately, from my boss's point of view, about 90% of the job was cold-calling, while I preferred to believe it was all about community relations, so I gave great promotional pitches and did virtually no cold-calling. I suppose a smart manager might have let me adjust my job responsibilities to allow me to play to my strengths in a way that everyone would have benefited, but I wasn't so lucky. After awhile, I was given a "lateral promotion" into an administrative support position and, when that didn't make me quit, they just fired me. (My boss assured me he was "doing me a favor." It didn't feel like it at the time, but he was right.)

It took me awhile to reap the rewards of this experience, but in retrospect I can see that this job helped me recognize in myself talents that the job didn't really make much use of -- such as public speaking and designing promotional materials. I also see that I hadn't yet learned what my grad school experience should have taught me -- don't just keep doing what you're doing if it's making you miserable. Try something else, even if you're not sure what that should be.