I work in IT. My current job is as a System Support Technician. I get to go to the servers sometimes on base, but mainly am in the office working with data, or configuring the different test servers in the office. I don’t hate the job, and some days am really happy when I learn something new, but other times I wonder about my job. It’s a job where I fix things that are broken, and setup things. It’s different from other jobs where I knew what I was doing, and working hard usually yielded good results. With this job, I can work for hours and days on a problem, and feel as if I yield no results. As an example, our boss was going to demo our applications to some very big people, and I had to configure the laptop server she’d take along with her. It was buggy, and if I had more time I would have liked to wipe it clean and start from scratch, but had to just plug away at it and apply some fixes, and hope for the best. If my job was to demo the laptop, I’d work very hard on what I was going to say and do and research and all that… but since my job is making sure the laptop works, it becomes an entirely different kind of pressure when things start happening like services won’t automatically start on bootup. I worked on it for many days, and I was still scared even though it was tested and seemed fine. I am still new to the field, and have only been working in IT for 2 years now. So I guess things will probably change for me if I stick with it.

Recently I’ve wondered if I should pursue my original plan of being an English instructor at a community college, since a master’s degree is sufficient, and doesn’t seem impossible for me to obtain thanks to evening classes. I do miss writing and reading. Nowadays I only buy computer books, and I don’t write unless I’m writing instructions for someone on how to install applications and configure a server.

I strayed from English when I was in school because my family was always broke, and needed money. So I went for a career that I thought would pay, and being an indecisive person, I also locked myself into a major which would help determine my future career for me. I like problem-solving, so server work suits me more than anything else I’ve seen in the IT field. I do lean a lot, but have much to learn.

2 years later, I don’t know whether or not I’d be better off going back to school or pursuing IT to the fullest.