Giving up on translation and interpretation

I read somewhere (and I think many people have said it) that the first key to success in life is to do a job you enjoy… I’ve always instinctively known that which is why I did tech theatre stuff as a part time job during college instead of finding a job that paid more than minimum wage….

But you have to factor in the money variable at some point, and I did when I came back from studying abroad in Japan. (except I think my life calculator was a little broken at the time, but no matter).

I gave up on theatre as a profession after almost 7 years of putting my heart and soul into it because I realized that the chances of it adequately paying off my student loans were slim-to-none.  Although I spent so much time on it (and now I kind of feel it was a waste of time. All but for the great memories and great experiences and the fact that its the one thing that really brought me out of my shell socially… so I have to be thankful for that).

In any case… the time comes again for me to give up on something and take a new, hopefully better direction:

When I decided to focus on Japanese, I didn’t have a very idea of what kinds of jobs I could do with my yet undeveloped language skills. I thought that translating or interpreting were really the only things available to people like me. I’ve been working as teacher using my spare time to study and get more proficient. But as I researched the field more, I realized that if I wanted to translate the types of things that I would find interesting (technical documents/IT related), I would need to have experience in the IT world AS WELL AS Japanese skills.

Take the next logical step and look for IT jobs in Japan… and I realized (with the help of some friends [Darin to be specific]) that I could work as IT professional in Japan if only I had some education in those fields as well.

So I’ve been looking at different IT careers and trying to find out what would fit me best. I’ve been teaching myself Visual C++ for the last month and its going well, but it still didn’t fit with the whole “do what you enjoy” motif.  So I thought more about my overall personal experience and interests with computers:

I like to fix things and have lots of experience with repair and upkeep of friends’ and family members’ computers.

I like to help people. I don’t want to be tied to a desk… I want my job to require a bit of moving and physical work… sitting in the same chair all damn day would kill me.

Lots of experience with every platform of Windows from 3.1 all the way up to Vista now (not including server editions, especially 2003, but how different can it possibly be?) I’m learning linux at the moment.

And I love to learn about and tinker with new hardware.

Compute above statements, carry the 1, divide by amount of extra education it would take and you get:

“network administrator”: The closest job I can think of at the moment to all this.

so thats my new plan. Hopefully this one works out well… I don’t know a whole lot about what I need to get a job like this. But hopefully theres a little bit of demand for it. The other option would be a help-desk kind of situation… but then I’m tied to a desk and a phone…. but I guess I could get used to it.

All I know about the network admin job so far is that getting CCNA (and eventually CCNP) certification might be a good idea. Anyone else have some bright ideas or suggestions?

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