Many of you have written me in appreciation of my article and wondering why in the world I was working at Wal~Mart. After all, why would somebody with a college degree be working in a lower income place like that?

I was a Math and Physics double major, and I wanted to go into particle physics research. But during my junior and senior years of College I became a bit disillusioned with a few things.

1st of all, I realized that in order to be a good researcher in the field, I was going to have to learn to be a good computer programmer. In the real world you can't always solve things analytically, which means you need to solve them with numerical approximation methods. (Which for all practical purposes are just as accurate.) But to do this a person needs to be good at writing computer programs. Now, I took a couple semesters of C++ and I did many of my advanced Physics assignments in MatLab, but I just didn't like it. I got decent grades in those assignments, but they mainly boiled down to guessing and guessing until I got the program to work right. I hated it, and I wasn't sure if I wanted to spend half of the rest of my life writing computer programs.

(I tell people "I knew what I wanted to do, when I went into College, but by the time I got out, I didn't.")

Most of the people who get degrees like that, aren't even doing physics. They're programming computers for big companies, and people who DO get into the field typically need to work 80/90+ hours a week just to stay competitive in the job market. I wasn't sure that it was worth an $80,000 a year paycheck. Perhaps to some people it is, and maybe if I hadn't gotten married, it would have been. But to me, I didn't think it was.

Which brings me to another reason. I got married a couple days after I graduated, and I wasn't sure that going to graduate school, and spending 60+ hours a week there, would be a fair thing to do to my new wife. Is that conducive to a new relationship?

Obviously not having an income isn't either, but you see my point.

It's difficult to do much with a Physics or Math bachelors degree unless less you go to graduate school and continue, or teach, but I don't have a teaching certificate, and I don't want to work in the Public Schools anyway. I do have applications out to a few of the private Catholic and Lutheran schools in the area however.

Basically I was working at Wal~Mart to pay the bills while I figure out what I want to do with the rest of my life. Perhaps I've figured that out now.

Tracy

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