How I Found My Career 

Cy Ellis 

Professor Bobbie Whitehead 

ENG 110C 

I graduated high school almost 10 years ago.  I thought I was going to be a meteorologist. All throughout high school I loved weather. Tornados and hurricanes fascinated me. I watched the show Storm Chasers on repeat. I dreamed of moving to Oklahoma to work at the National Weather Service’s Storm Prediction Center with some of the best meteorologists the country had to offer. So I applied to the colleges that would set me on the right and prepared to start my journey. Life rarely works out the way you plan when you are in high school though.  

Everything was falling into place. I wanted to go straight to a big four year university and applied to as many as I could. I soon discovered that even with scholarships four year universities can be very expensive. Instead, I signed up for classes at my local community college and was ready to start. I was going on a full scholarship, or so I thought. Then one day right before classes started the school pulled all my financial aid and decided I was no longer an in-state student. This was an unexpected derailment to my plans. Rather in helping me rectify this issue, I was told I could play a full price and take out student loans. Not wanting to rack up a bunch of student loans, I pivoted to something I had little interest in: joining the navy.  

After taking my ASVAB exam I qualified for pretty much any job that I wanted, except for meteorologist. So I decided to take a large enlistment bonus and try to become a nuclear electrician. I wanted to go to the toughest school the navy had to offer to prove to myself that I was capable of it. After six incredibly challenging months of school later I discovered that I was in fact not capable of passing nuclear electrician school and failed out despite my best efforts. So yet again I was at a crossroad. I could either leave the navy as a washout or take any non-nuclear job I wanted on a submarine. One of those jobs was IT. My dad had been an IT as long as I could remember, and his job never seemed that bad. Combine that with the fact that the person advising me told me the “LAN” in LAN division stood for “Leave At Noon” and I was sold. Shortly after I was on a plane to Connecticut to submarine school to learn how be a submariner and an IT. 

When I was in nuclear electrician school, I was on forced study hours. On top of PT at 5 a.m. and class from 7 a.m. to p.m., I had another 40 hours of mandatory study time every week. Everything was harder for me than anyone else in my class. I fell behind quickly, and no matter how much I studied and drilled things into my head, I could never understand the material. This was not the case for me in IT school. I breezed through at the top of my class without ever breaking a sweat. Everything came naturally to me. From the first lesson through the last one a year and a half later it felt as if I had known everything already, and it just needed to be unlocked. It almost felt like I was cheating after coming from electrician school. And the best part was, I enjoyed it.  

After finishing my IT schools, it was time to head to my first duty station, a submarine out of San Diego. I was beyond excited. The way I breezed through school I thought I would show up and immediately blow everyone away. Yet again, I was wrong. I realized within my first few weeks that school had not at all prepared me for my real job. I was shellshocked. I showed up to a boat with a depleted and undermanned IT division that was struggling to keep its head above water. And the stuff we learned in school had little-to-no use on the boat. I didn’t even know how to properly make an ethernet cable and that was the easiest part of our job. I was shellshocked but I persevered. 

As a junior sailor I grew up in a division full of people who were tough. They were more than happy to sit down and explain things to me but hated repeating themselves. With the amount of work, we had there wasn’t time for it. The best thing I could do was take on work and learn how to do whatever it was on the fly. I became a sponge. I learned everything I could from the experienced members of my division and took every new task as a challenge. I didn’t want anyone to hold my hand and buried myself in my work. Every day I took steps to better myself and become more skilled as a technician. I also failed way more often than I would like to admit. My chief told me once that sometimes you must break things in order to understand how to fix them. I took that a little too literally at times. From these failures I learned how to analyze my shortcomings and move forward.  

The ability to look at my work critically, good or bad and look for ways I could have done things better set me apart from my peers. I was passionate about my job. I might not have enjoyed my time in the navy, but I loved my job, and it showed. Before I left the boat I was promoted to a supervisory role and was running the network preforming well above what was expected for my rank. 

When I graduated high school 10 years ago I never would have thought my life would end up where it did. The best laid plans rarely come to fruition though. While I never became the meteorologist I expected myself to become, I discovered a career that excites me and shows me what true passion can feel like.