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Making a Difference: How to Choose Meaningful Work
When you’re working one of the most important things is motivation. If you’re insufficiently motivated, you’ll find yourself dragging your lumpen carcass out of bed on a Monday morning, resenting every minute of your commute and sleepwalking through your day, ending up with no energy to pursue personal projects or relaxation in your leisure time.
The best motivation comes from choosing work that’s meaningful to you. Work that makes a difference, so that at the end of every day, you know the effort you’ve put in is linked to very real results – people working in medicine, in social work, in substance misuse jobs deal with people every day and despite being frequently stretched for resources and under stress, get to make genuine differences to people lives every day (for the better, crucially).
If you don’t have the skills or, in fairness, inclination to pursue a job like this you need to either reframe your attitude to your existing job to emphasise how you’re making a difference, or find an alternative career to move into that lets you feel that you’re contributing in a meaningful way. You don’t need to be an ambulance driver or brain surgeon, just find a job that you feel is worthwhile or take a fresh look at your existing role to understand your real worth within the organisation.
If you’re in a position to change your job, think before you leap. If you’re dissatisfied and leap into a new position before you’ve really thought it through, you might find yourself just as dissatisfied and needing to sit in your new job for months or years before you can change again.
Be honest with yourself, and make sure you’re reorienting yourself towards a career that you find important and meaningful, not what is, on average, expected to be. There’s no point pursuing a career as a social worker to impress your friends with your social responsibility when you simply don’t have the motivation. If your strength is in administration, then you can put that towards a meaningful job in local government. If you’re into sales at heart, becoming an estate agent allows you to put your skills into finding people homes, and while estate and lettings agents can get a bad rap, if you deal fairly with people you’ll impress them and they’ll never forget you!
If you’re not able to change your job, talk to your manager about shadowing people in other departments. This gives you an insight into how your input is valued across the company and a new commitment it.
Healthcare Career Paths You Can Consider as You Complete Your Studies
If you need to choose a major soon or are heading off to university in the coming months and are still trying to decide which program to enroll in, it’s important to learn about a wide variety of job types and career paths, so you have a better idea of what you might be most interested in and suited to.
If you’ve always been interested in the healthcare field, perhaps you’ve thought about becoming a doctor, dentist, PT, chiropractor and so on. However, you should note that demand in healthcare is growing at a rate that’s twice as high as the national economy, so you have a range of occupations to choose from apart from the well-known ones.
For those looking for a little inspiration or some clarity, it’s time to think outside the box. Read on for some interesting healthcare jobs you might not have considered yet but which could be just the right path for you.
Phlebotomist
Are you someone who doesn’t feel faint at the first sign of blood? If so, a job as a phlebotomist might be up your alley. The term phlebotomy originates from a combination of Greek words. There is “phlebo,” which relates to a blood vessel, and “tomy,” which refers to making an incision. If you become a phlebotomist, you’ll be a medical technician who extracts blood from people with a sterilized needle. This procedure is called venipuncture. The samples of blood taken during this process are used for blood transfusion or as a means of testing to evaluate patient health.
In their jobs, phlebotomists assist doctors and nurses by taking patients’ blood. They can work in a variety of facilities, such as medical centers, labs, hospitals, clinics and dedicated blood-collection facilities. On top of collecting and testing blood, these professionals may also work with urine and other samples. A key part of the position is also setting up tests accurately, so the correct details are written on sample tubes, and blood is tested for the correct things.
Healthcare Manager
An emerging area of healthcare is one in which workers combine management skills with proactive, hands-on, day-to-day work. This is the job of healthcare manager. People working in this field must be dedicated to improving the quality of healthcare and increasing patient safety levels. This is a leadership-based position that involves managers working across administrative and leadership functions, whether covering a single department or an entire venue.
Healthcare executives, or administrators as they’re also known, must work closely with a variety of medical personnel, plus suppliers, custodial staff, potentially government employees and other types of contacts involved in the delivery of healthcare. Positions can be based within health centers, hospitals, nursing homes, rehabilitation centers or even government organizations. As such, there is plenty of diversity in potential roles.
If you become a healthcare manager, you will likely have to take care of many different aspects of a facility. For example, you’ll need to oversee the staff working at the venue or within your department, plus you’ll be required to run the center’s operations, manage its budget, handle strategic planning and act as a spokesperson when media representatives require quotes or data.
Crisis Counselor
Another healthcare role that has been growing over recent years and which seems to be required more than ever, is that of a crisis counselor. This particular type of mental health counselor helps patients who have been through some kind of traumatic, emotionally intense, and/or exhausting experience.
If you complete your counseling master’s online, you can join this specialized field and help your clients in numerous ways. You can be there to offer emotional support to sufferers, and you can help them recover from and move past a crisis, through avenues such as the sharing of information and activities.
You will help patients to understand their own limiting beliefs or feelings and assist them to create new, healthy structures in their lives. You can be there to help people find ways of restoring their sense of control after a traumatic event. Counselors in this specialization typically only work with patients for a short period, such as one to three months.
How to Make the Most of Your College Degree
For many so-called traditional students, college is just a way to get away from home, earn some independence and have fun with friends. Friday nights come first, and education comes second. However, if you want to make the most out of your college experience and academic investment, there are a few things that should factor into your decision of where to attend school, what to study and how to approach your academic years.
Major Bummer
You have more choice than ever when it comes to your focus of study. With so many course options at today’s universities, you need to decide the best route. More than 20 million students now flood American campuses, and even with the amount of variety offered, the same majors top the list of most popular subjects to study. That means a couple of things: First, there are some credentials that will always be in-demand and provide lucrative post-educational compensation; secondly, there’s a whole lot of opportunity out there for those who are willing to step outside the box.
Business, psychology, nursing, biology and teaching degrees round out the top five most popular majors. These fields are crowded, and even with the amount of jobs available, there are still plenty of college grads with these degrees who can’t find employment. That’s why you need to think different. Kind of like this:
The Major of the Future
While your old classmates are spinning their wheels looking for any low-level opportunity out there, you can be making sizable early career leaps in a specialty field. And it doesn’t even take a niche college halfway across the globe to find a program that will get you there. Among others, there are autism certification programs online that will launch you into a successful and fulfilling career your friends only dream of.
Completing a program such as this one will allow you to help those in need while bringing home a healthy paycheck. A rewarding and financially beneficial field like this is something that most high-school graduates don’t even consider when selecting their colleges. If it’s something you can see yourself doing (and liking), the negatives are hard to find. Not only will you secure a financially sound future after you graduate, but you can save money while attending school simply by electing to complete your degree via online courses. Sounds like a win-win, doesn’t it?
Consider the Job Market
Though we shouldn’t celebrate any increase in difficulty, more problems in the world generally requires more people to create solutions.
Such is the case in a field like autism education. Now one in every 59 children is diagnosed with the disorder. On one hand, this means more students are struggling to learn and relate to peers; on the other hand, it means these students are achieving greater visibility, which results in increased need for qualified professionals, like you. Not only does that mean that there will be a need for your position, but it also means you’ll be genuinely helping a cause. Making money and feeling like you’ve done society a service all in one job is about as good as you can ask for. In an industry where so many people need help, you can be a beacon of light.
Easy Does It
While specialized fields like autism education may be challenging, it is not as difficult to break into as you might expect. You can complete your chosen degree in a relatively short time, especially if you choose an accelerated online program. It’s important to remember that not every major is created equally. While some programs will take time and dedication, most will leave you plenty of time to do what all college kids love to do.
There are hundreds of majors to choose from, and it’s almost impossible to know which one is right for you when you’re being forced to pick. But entering a field that most people don’t aim for provides a long list of pros and a short list of cons. If you’re undecided how to approach your college experience, this is a good place to get started.
Is There a Place for Machine Translation in Business?
Five years ago, the answer might have been “definitely no”. However, since then artificial intelligence has made significant inroads into business writing. You may be surprised to know how many articles machines generate on Huffington Post and Harvard Business Review.
Naturally, a human tidies them up afterwards, but the spadework is already done. Similar technology is evolving in the translation industry. Hence, it is best to understand the mix we require, before we contact a company specialized in document translation services.
Striking the Right Balance before Contacting a Translator
Human effort comes at a cost. If we can find a machine to do the heavy lifting, we save money and time. This is especially true for translation, because unlike original writing the content of the document is already set.
However, we do need to find a company specializing in document translation services with a thorough approach. This may mean comparing the original and translation line by line, as opposed to simply tidying up the latter. Here are a few examples of what I mean by this.
Product Descriptions for Internet Catalogues
E-Traders with hundreds of items are more interested in cost than exemplary grammar. Much of their content is there to meet Amazon/eBay requirements. Besides, shoppers are more likely to want to know what comparison sites say. Therefore, a tentative thumbs up for machine translation here.
Product Descriptions for High Tech Industries
However, if I were a nuclear power station operator to cite an extreme case, I would not recommend letting a machine loose on critical procedures. The words “must,” “should,” “may,” and “might” can be mission critical. Therefore, I would contact a company specialized in document translation services in this instance.
What about Marketing Copy and General Business Translation?
Yes, those are two good examples where a blend of machines and human translation provides the best mix. Any multinational corporate will see the sense of mass machine translation into multiple languages. However, I would ask a translator fluent in the destination language to cast an eye over the result and comment.
Things Are Seldom Black or White, Including in Translation
The third dimension to the decision is, of course, cost. I would love a Ferrari but I settle for a Toyota because it gets me there, albeit it at the loss of privilege. Professional translators understand the cost dilemma and always do their best to find the right balance.
Hence I recommend you contact a company specialized in document translation services that understands the potential, and the limitations of machine translation.
The Main Reasons Why Alcohol & Drugs Will Affect Your Academic Performance… Badly
“I drink too much. Last time I gave a urine sample, it had an olive in it.”
– Rodney Dangerfield, U.S. comedian
Ask your parents if they drank too much alcohol during their time at college, and their replies will vary somewhere between the complete, swear-on-the-Holy-Bible and God’s honest truth kind of answer, and the blatant, downright lie. Ask them if they did drugs, however, and, chances are, pretty much all those responses would probably get thrown out in a court of law, with the judge threatening contempt.
“Hey, Mom, you ever get stoned? Were you a pothead in college, Dad?”
Not the conversation to be had at the evening dinner table at the end of a long day, unless your Mom and Dad are going through a period of enlightened California-style parenting. For many parents of kids in college, it wasn’t that they drank or did drugs during their time. It’s more a case of they got through college in spite of them. Perhaps, just like what you’re doing.
I’ll be honest. College, when I was younger, was a blur. My memory of it now is just a retail collection of moments like old polaroids – putting them together in some semblance of order is the problem.
Allow me to introduce myself.
My name is Andy, I’m a mid-thirties digital marketing entrepreneur, running a successful agency, who, for over 9 years now, has lived a completely clean and sober life. No alcohol, no drugs, no nada. Just abstinence.
However, for the vast majority of my adolescent years, I was an alcoholic and a drug addict, saved only my own Mom and Dad finally threw me on the backseat of the family car, drove me to the next state over, and deposited what was left of their son, hopeless addict, physical and mental wreck, and an ex-con to boot, on the steps of a drug and alcohol rehabilitation center.
Get busy living, Andy, and all that. So I did, and I gave rehab everything.
6 months later, I emerged, clean, sober, physically and mentally the fittest I’d ever been or felt, and now with a decent education. I had majored in addiction, and in rehab, I learned as much as I could about this chronic, sometimes fatal disease that nearly took my life – it’s amazing what you can do with a clear head.
If you want to know how drugs and alcohol will negatively affect your academic performance, read on. If you’re reading this, and thinking, “You know what, Andy? You seem like a nice guy, and I’m glad you turned your life around, and all that. To be honest, though, I don’t really care,” then what follows will make you care.
Let’s look at the 2 most popular substances used, and often abused, on any U.S. campus, and why they will affect your academic performance… badly:
- Alcohol, and
- Marijuana
The intoxication from both will continue to have a detrimental effect on a student’s cognitive function – primarily, attention, concentration, and memory – for around 48 hours afterward. In other words, get drunk on the Friday night, because you’ve got exams on Monday to study for, and the weekend is your only revision time left, and you’ve just shot your academic self in the foot.
Serious abuse of both can lead to the spiral of addiction, and I’m sure you don’t want to have that conversation with Mom and Dad…
Alcohol
Memory: As described above, heavy drinking will affect cognitive function long after you wake up with the obligatory hangover, and will probably mean you start the day with a positive blood alcohol level as well as your pounding head. This alcohol still present in your system directly affects your ability to process and store new information – to fully understand it, and then to successfully retain it in its entirety.
For the biology students out there, “intoxication is produced by a temporary impairment of brain receptors key in creating long-term memories in the hippocampus“, says Duke University’s Jeff Georgi, an Alcohol and Addictions Program coordinator at the school. “If you study for four hours…then go drinking, it affects this anchoring process.”
Sleep: Alcohol messes with your sleep too. Normal sleep cycle interference results in irritability, fatigue, and an increase in anxiety, all of which will directly affect a student’s learning ability for up to 48 hours.
Stress: As the old joke goes, alcohol is only a solution if you’re a chemist. In reality, alcohol doesn’t stop stress, or “academic success-anxiety,” just the symptoms of it – temporarily. By actually not self-medicating with alcohol or drugs, you are giving yourself a far better chance to naturally resolve what is causing the stress.
Marijuana
Memory, Concentration, & Attention: As described above, marijuana use (well, pretty much all drug use) will affect cognitive function long after you wake up, directly affecting your ability to simply pay attention and, indeed, concentrate in the classroom, and then being able to store that information in your memory.
Sleep: When used in the evening and at night time, marijuana is pretty much the same as alcohol when it comes to your sleep cycle, resulting in increases in irritability, fatigue, and anxiety, again, directly affecting learning ability.
Motivation: Now, if you’re sat there reading this, and you’re a little surprised by the use of the word “motivation,” oh, please… Seriously, there is mounting evidence that marijuana use affects your motivation, likely due to a combination neuronal suppression (the hippocampus, again), the blocking of nutrients through cells, and fatigue following disturbed sleep.
Anxiety: Although not an academic reason, it’s worth mentioning that marijuana use increases heart rate, weakens the heart muscle, and increases blood pressure – all of which should concern someone already diagnosed with anxiety. However, as with self-medicating with alcohol, marijuana does nothing to resolve the issues creating your anxiety and stress.
No Lecture
There you have them – the main reasons why alcohol and drugs will affect your academic performance… badly. Forego the alcohol consumption (if you’re binge drinking, and college students have been known to do that on a regular basis, please cut it out of your life – it’s seriously dangerous), and forego getting stoned in the belief it will only do you good. You’ll feel better, and perform better academically without them.
Without these substances, you’ll feel so much better, you’ll be naturally happier, you’ll be more attentive, you’ll be able to concentrate fully, and you’ll enjoy a better memory. As a college student striving for academic success, it makes sense, doesn’t it?
How does alcohol or marijuana use affect your academic performance, or do you believe it doesn’t? Let us know by sharing a comment below.
