Hi I’m Tom, I’m 29, I've changed careers four times, and I’m a Dad (Part 1)

This post will be broken into two parts because I couldn’t edit my damn self down enough to fit it all in under 1,700 words.

The vast majority of people read articles on the internet to gain something for themselves, not to read a post about another person whom they’ve never met, and will likely never meet in the flesh. So I’m going to try to sprinkle in as much usable life advice as I possibly can in my intro post. My path has been incredibly zig zagged, and I have learned much in my travels.

I graduated from a Chico State University in 2008, directly into the heart of America’s worst recession since World War Two, and had absolutely no idea and no plans for what I wanted to do with my life. I bought a one way ticket to New Zealand and had a brief jaunt down under working as bartender and traveling around a bit, which was great but not transformational, as I didn’t really accomplish anything except racking up debt that I am still paying off today (the trip was paid for with student loans that I took right before graduating).

I returned to America in debt from the trip, and straight to my parent’s garage in a middle-class neighborhood in Oakland, CA, a city that is now booming with gentrification from the tech industry. I had my childhood friends, a crappy car that I’m still driving today, and no clue. I had been a camp counselor every summer for years, so I figured I could perhaps use that experience to get some sort of ‘career’ job in the education field.

I became an Oakland Public Schools Substitute teacher and after-school tutor/sports coach at an inner city middle school. I was now finally getting full blown interaction with the part of the city that I was told to stay away from growing up. I then did this job on and off for the next three years, with breaks for traveling to Southeast Asia and working at a science camp in Southern California. I taught everything from kindergarten to sports to Math, at every grade level.

Rather than get into the details, of which there are too many to even remember, I’d rather just bullet point the three most important lessons learned from being a 22 year old white male substitute teaching in inner-city American schools:

1. Unless a child is posing a threat to your safety or the safety of others, you should try as hard as you can not to get mad at them or enforce discipline. What they could be going through in their life outside of the classroom is much worse than you can imagine, and getting mad and giving unnecessary punishment will only instigate the child to behave more disrespectfully towards you. Give them the benefit of the doubt, remain calm, and simply listen.
   When dealing with children, you must have no ego.

2. When taunted, harassed, called every slur imaginable by your students, you simply need to not care. If you get personally insulted by something a child says to you, you should not teach. I got picked on more as a substitute teacher than I did when I was in school myself, but it was different. I learned what I wished I had known when I was in school, that if you react, you lose.

3. Children who have limited positive male role models in their life are desperate to connect and build relationships with younger adult men. The impact you are having, particularly as a male teacher to male students, is much greater than you can imagine to a child that doesn’t have a dad. Be a positive role model and connect.

By the time I turned 26 I had worked in just about every school in Oakland and knew 100% that I would never become a teacher full time. This is because while I knew I could have an impact on students lives, I would be stuck working within the confines of the public school system, which in my opinion, sucks. The current education system beats the imagination and creativity out of students by enforcing unnecessarily rigid and uniform codes of conduct, and is also institutionally discriminatory against minorities and the poor, especially in the Bay Area, where the difference in school quality from rich to poor is extreme. I wanted to make a difference, but not from within the system.

I also wanted to make money. I had a friend that had been working for FEMA (Federal Emergency Management Agency) for a couple of years, and making way more money than I was, and he claimed my Environmental Economics degree was good enough to get me the same job.

I filled out an application packet, and through some sort of loophole or government incompetency, I was hired without ever actually being interviewed. The job was to do Environmental Compliance reviews on disaster relief projects, which required me to be available to deploy to any part of America within 5 days notice, at any time. It also meant that I didn’t have work unless I was deployed to a disaster somewhere, which I liked because I thought I could make enough money for the whole year in 6 months, and then take 6 months off to travel and do whatever I wanted.

Well, I got hired, but again through some kind of loophole or incompetency, I was not deployed to a disaster for almost a whole year after being hired, and had to continue to substitute teach in Oakland for that time.

When I did get deployed, it was to New York City for Hurricane Sandy in 2012. This is probably the luckiest deployment I could have imagined, since most disasters happen in places like Oklahoma.

What I arrived to in New York was the most incompetent and overgrown government system on Earth, or at least the worst that I knew of. I immediately noticed how much money and time was being wasted, and precious disaster relief dollars going to seemingly pointless things. I suppose a lot of it is just the way large government organizations work, but it seemed like most of us in my department didn’t have jack squat to do the majority of the time, and really didn’t need to be going to all these meetings, as we rarely had anything to add to them,

It also seemed like the attitude of most of the agency was to get the environmental reviews done as quickly as possible, and to expedite everything with simple interpretations of complex environmental laws. I actually prided myself in getting environmental reviews done extremely fast, which I now realize was part of the problem. Who knows what endangered species habitat got destroyed as a result of my ‘ability to get reviews done fast.’

The plus side for me was living in New York City. I actually had a friend there and started meeting people and having a bit of a social life. Also, my government per diem for lodging was about $230 a night, so I had over $6000/month of federal funds to spend on rent. I started out by living in a hotel room, but quickly learned I could get a super nice ‘corporate apartment.’

While most New Yorkers struggle to afford a room in a fifth floor walkup, I had a luxury apartment with floor to ceiling windows, a washer and dryer, dishwasher, and two bathrooms on 34th and Park ave, with a gorgeous view of the Chrysler building outside my window. It was shockingly nice to everyone that visited me, and still probably the nicest place I ever lived.

The View from My Federally Funded NYC Apartment

I still miss New York, but I had to leave because I was so bored at work. The projects slowed down, and I couldn’t stand pretending to look busy at my computer anymore, plus I saved about $20,000, so I was ready to go.

Again, the bullet points of what I learned working at a bloated government agency where everyone pretends to be busy when there’s nothing to actually do:

1. Never take a ‘career’ job just for the money, this is how you end up being really really bored at work and questioning the meaning of your existence.

2. If you often have to pretend to look busy at work, it’s time to quit. Don’t waste your time.

3. The government spends probably $10 on administrative costs for every $1 it actually gives out in financial assistance. I have no idea if this is actually true, but it seemed like it considering there were thousands of us who were getting over $6,000 a month for rent and $2,000 a month for food, untaxed.

4. Apparently being a good employee doesn’t always get your rewarded, but puts you in an uncomfortable place where the people in charge are worried that you are going to make them look bad. This didn’t happen to me, but it did happen to my best manager, who was ridiculed and chastised for being ‘too thorough’ by lazy managers who were pretty much just concerned about putting money away for retirement, and not the environment.

I took a few months off and did one more deployment to Colorado, for the ‘1000 year flood’ that happened in 2013. That deployment ended up being worse than the New York deployment and very strongly reinforced my decision to get out of this line of work, despite the very good money.

In between those deployments, I also met the woman that I now love and have a 20 month old son with, so I was for sure no longer going to keep deploying to different disaster sites across America.
This love brought me to San Diego, California, a completely different line of work, and to a pregnancy that happened six months after we started dating, which ultimately strengthened and solidified our bond.

Stay tuned for part 2