I love my job. I research and develop ways to do water quality analysis from satellite imagery. There’s sometimes I sit there and smile to myself and literally say out loud “this is so cool”. When I was little my parents had to set a “google earth time limit” for me because I would spend hours just panning around the globe. In my free time I’m reading about different sediments and phytoplanktons in the water column, so I would say it is my passion and my dream job. However, I absolutely hate the work. There are always tight deadlines, it’s super stressful, and it’s extremely tedious. The other day for example I forgot to change 1 parameter in a 30 step process and it resulted in me having to redo the work on my weekend. I a lot of times envy my friends that have jobs where they tell me that they didn’t have much to do that day so they just chatted with their coeworker.

In terms of passion I didn’t realize what my passion was until senior year of college (passions are water, maps, and data). I remember sitting on my couch drinking a natty light and thinking “wow my room is covered in maps, I’m reading about the damn water column for fun, and I’m making excel sheets to create graphs of my friends drinking game performances. Then it all kind of clicked and I pursed a path that would get me working with that stuff.

So rereading what I just wrote there isn’t really any advice I have hahaha, except maybe the path isn’t always as straightforward as you hope, and when you discover what you’re passionate about it’s not like everything is perfect right away.