Career plan
Project description
Assignment: For this assignment, you are asked to research your preferred careers. Your career plan should discuss a first and second choice career
in depth, with your plans regarding those careers, in 5 double-spaced pages, plus a bibliography. Any clear format is fine. You are being graded on
the quality of your career research and analysis here, and on the clarity of your presentation, not on formal details.
In recent years the number of hours at work, job stress and insecurity has increased substantially, thus, while deciding on a career, you must
research a lot more than just the pay. Researching the working hours, job duties, satisfaction, and lifestyle of a career (and later a specific job
in that career) is one of the most important things you can do to assure that you have the kind of life you desire.
It is also important to look at not just the broad careers, but also at the more specific sub-careers. For example, just broadly researching lawyers
is a good start, but stopping there may be misleading, because if you want to be an environmental lawyer you will typically make less than the
average lawyer, but if you want to be a corporate lawyer, you will typically make more, and the hours, duties, and lifestyle will also be very
different.
You should describe the careers including compensation, job duties, typical hours, job satisfaction, lifestyle, advancement, and any other important
factors. If your career might involve graduate or professional school, you must research this also. You must report what these programs are like and
a good informed strategy for how to get into a good one, including what kind of classes you should be taking now, what job experience these graduate
schools like to see, and how to prepare for graduate admissions exams like the GRE, MCAT, and GMAT.
Taking a prep course, like those at Stanley Kaplan or The Princeton Review, is almost always a great investment. I had a classmate at the University
of Michigan MBA school who lifted his GMAT score from the 78th percentile to the 97th after taking Kaplan; this moved him up perhaps two tiers in the
MBA schools, resulting in probably millions of dollars in additional income over his lifetime.