Expectations Vs. Reality: What They Don't Tell You In School
- Leor V
- Sep 12, 2024
- 5 min read
One of the most important career lessons I ever learned came from my driving instructor.
Driving didn’t come naturally to me, so I need a *lot* of lessons! This gave me plenty of time to hear all about my driving instructor and his family during our drives. As a proud father he naturally liked to share about his kids, but there was one particular cautionary tale he made sure to tell all of his students.
His daughter knew she wanted to be a dentist her whole life. She worked very hard toward this goal, gaining top grades in high school, and eventually getting into the dental school of her dreams. Everything was going great, she was acing her dental theory exams and fulfilling her life-long dream… that is until 3rd year of dental school.
You see, 3rd year is when she put her hands into a real patient’s mouth for the first time. For that is when my driving instructor’s daughter realized that she does not like putting her hands into people’s mouths. And just like that, years of planning and efforts went down the drain and she went back to square one: leaving dental school with nothing to show for it and having to think up a whole new career path and start again.
The reason I share this lesson for anyone starting out in a career, or considering a career pivot, is that it illustrates how crucial it is to get your hands “into the mouth” of your new career as early as possible. Find out exactly what your day-to-day work will entail and be very realistic about whether this is something you can do.
I myself had a much smaller misstep as I started out on my own path. I thought that I wanted to go into management / leadership without knowing exactly what that means. In fact, I started out my undergrad in Business & Management (with a minor in Computer Science), but it didn’t take me long to realize that my school’s program was not teaching me the skills that I had expected. Rather than learning hands-on, practical skills for being an effective leader I was finding myself having to memorize Adam Smith’s date of birth for my midterm exam. This was not what I thought I signed up for.
Fortunately in my case, I did not have to go back to zero because I found my minor in CS to be very practical indeed. I dropped Business studies and became a Computer Science major at the end of my first year. In this way, I decided to focus on my software development skills as a way to start out on career path a which would flourish into leadership opportunities over time. So I put in my time in school dreaming of climbing the leadership ladder on the foundation of my technical skills until I managed my own team.
However, within the early months of my first job out of school I had another “hands in mouth” type moment of my own about this management dream. And this was probably the biggest reality vs. expectation moment of my path.
My cubicle was positioned across from a very powerful executive’s office. I could see she regularly dialed-in to important meetings and managed a large part of the organization (well, it would be more accurate to say I could hear, because her voice was very loud and carried throughout the entire office). I could also see that she was pregnant and expecting a baby. I myself love kids, so I thought that was very exciting that she was about to become a mom. Over the next few months her baby bump grew and grew (and of course she had impeccable professional maternity wear), until finally her due date arrived, and off she went on leave to have her baby. I thought now we’d have a bit of peace and quiet in our part of the office without loud and important daily meetings for a few months while she’s out with her new baby.
But the last thing I expected was to see her back in the office just two weeks later, picking up her work without missing a beat, and the 14-day old baby staying home with nanny. Now, I completely understand that there are superwomen who can do it all, like leading an entire huge tech company with their own newborn at home, but seeing this play out in front of me really made me question my own priorities and plans.
Above all, I knew that I wanted to have a family and kids one day. And more than that, I wanted to be there for them and with them. This is of course an individual choice, and the priorities of work vs. kids may play out differently for others, but I decided at that time that if I had a choice, I would opt for a career path that allowed me the most personal balance and flexibility. This turned out to be staying on the technical track and advancing as an individual contributor while my kids were little.
Looking back, I do feel very lucky that I had this exposure / experience so early and could take away the important lesson of shaping my career according to realistic expectations.
Unfortunately, this is something that they simply don’t teach us at college. When guiding us to choose a major they ask whether we enjoy Math and Science vs. Art and Literature, but they don’t ask us how we envision balancing our work and home life. I don’t recall anyone advising us that there are certain jobs where you will have to leave your newborn at home if you want to reach the top, while there are other jobs where you can achieve success while raising a family.
In fact, this message is so valuable that I think it could help teens in high school to make more informed decisions about their future when applying to colleges and picking their majors.
It is now many years later, and I’m quite the confident and experienced driver myself, but I hope that my old driving instructor is still spreading the message of putting your hands into the mouth of your career to the next generation of drivers and getting them to think earlier on about their career expectations vs. career reality.
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