The Beast

Nagy liked Mahomes better than Trubisky? How do you know?

I’d be willing to help you explore and find something Jack. If I can help, let me know. Send me your resume and your thoughts on fields that might be interesting to you and I’ll see what I can come up with.

What is your degree in and where is it from? It doesn’t matter that much but I thought I would ask. I don’t have a disability so I can’t say that I have been in your shoes, but I do know what it is like to study something and decide the job or career isn’t for me. I know what it feels like to feel stuck. I went to school to try and be a few things - a high school English teacher, a sports journalist or news broadcaster or work in sports in some capacity. After four years of school, multiple college majors and one college transfer, I graduated with a BA in Business Administration/Management. I have worked for a professional sports team, a PR firm, a startup, as a leave administrator and assistant account manager for an EAP company in Chicago and I have worked for an insurance company. None of the jobs have given me fulfillment and only my current one has given me a middle class wage. The current employer has paid for graduate school classes in data science and I am taking an elective in health care administration (I have also tried to pick up Python and have learned about ICD and CPT codes on my own). My wife and I own a home in the suburbs and she wants kids in the near future, something I am warming up to but concerned about with my current salary. I’m 31 and she’s older. I have a job where opportunity feels limited because the major offices are in Washington and Connecticut and I don’t work alongside a local team to learn directly from them. Opportunities I have been presented with are underwriting, data science and implementation. The issue is that I can’t learn very well with remote teams and would like to get into a health care related industry that would pay me better, gives me interesting work (data analysis, health care informatics) and may eventually allow me to go back to school for something that won’t get automated and has an impact on the world, like nursing. I have a connection somewhere that might allow me to hit on the first two of these things, along with working with a local team but it’s not perfect. My point in telling you this is that you aren’t the only one who feels stuck out there. I’ve changed jobs several times and I still don’t feel closer to finding meaningful work. And with the obligations that I have, I may never have that. But the one thing I have is hope, hope that what I am doing now will pay off for me in the future. That gives me some optimism even if there is lots of uncertainty. I certainly can’t imagine all of what you face but I would point out that with a positive mindset, some things are possible in life no matter the circumstances.

Jack, how long have you been out of work? What jobs have you applied to recently? What jobs are you targeting?

That is all you can do. I wish I could change my educational background from the past and end up in a different career. We only have today and the future to look forward to. The past is the past.

Nope, it’s the same thing on my tv. It’s driving me nuts.

Is Stone on vacation? Who is with Benetti for this series?

83!! Does anyone know if McNeil and Parkins stopped doing “Can’t Do It” on their show? Loved hearing B&B on Monday. Also love when Bernstein goes after dumb callers.

I wish the Cub games weren’t on weekdays. That’s kind of stupid.

Just a FYI that Boers and Bernstein are on again today from 9-12.

Herrera is owed too much to be released. Sanchez can be removed from the list as well, unless they were to keep Garcia.

Oh no, the sky is falling. Won’t somebody think of the children.

I predict they will dangle Abreu, Bummer and Colome and walk away from trade offers since they won’t get the value they want. 15 days to go.

Fry too. Interesting. I don’t think Abreu gets dealt.

I don’t think so. They aren’t going to get what people want anyway.

Rondon threw at second and it went wide of Sanchez at the bag into right field. Soxtalk’s meltdown around the trade deadline asking to trade Colome and Abreu ensues.?

Hold, not sell. What do we think we will get for pieces we should hold onto and build on in 2020? Abreu, Colome and Bummer are on my list to keep. Try selling Leury but don’t trade anything if you don’t get anything worth it. It doesn’t make sense to deal everyone like in last years.

Thanks Greg. I think I can let journalism go because I I don’t want to be a reporter and writing for a living is just “okay” to me. I’m not seeing a good future in broadcasting either. As for a school counseling position, I think I’d rather do mental health counseling as opposed to working with kids and even then I’m not sure about pursuing that. But I think what I’m going to do is leave my company, work in an office that has a main office in Illinois and work for a health care organization. I am aiming for one that will pick up the tab of the remainder of my degree next year. From there, I’ll probably work in the corporate world, have a family and if I need to, retrain later on for something in healthcare where I could work with patients. We will see what cool opportunities happen as a result of my efforts, I’m kind of excited about the health care administration course I’m taking this fall since it should give me the lay of the land in hospitals and health insurance. I definitely will welcome other ideas, commentary and suggestions from other posters here.

It seems like ever since my sophomore year at college, I have tried to do different things to try and find the right career path for me. I was an average student in high school and I grew up wanting to be in sports media. I tried journalism and broadcasting out a bit more in college after liking it in high school and found out it wasn’t for me. The life of a reporter, the uncertain job prospects and salary and writing or doing radio or TV for a living just didn’t seem like a fit. I also thought about becoming an English teacher because I loved writing and reading autobiography books, but I didn’t care much for literature, so I felt education wasn’t the fit for me either. Some days I have I thought teaching business or PE or being a guidance counselor might have been a fit and that maybe I was in the wrong content area. But my wife is a teacher and after hearing from her, it doesn’t seem like I would fit well with kids. I also observed guidance counseling and think it takes a certain kind of person to work in that role and I don’t think I am that person. I switched majors, went to a different school and finished my degree in business administration/management. I reached out to the White Sox about jobs in sports and spoke to Boyer about opportunities and interned with the St. Louis Rams, but nothing ended up coming from those opportunities. I tried my hand at PR, worked at a start up and interned at a PR agency and didn’t like pitching to reporters. I needed a job with a salary to support myself as the other jobs didn’t pay anything. So I did FMLA administration for a few years, but it was call center work and I hated the pay that I got even after being promoted and felt I would be a better fit elsewhere since I didn’t like the company or work. So I have been working at an insurance carrier, where I work with underwriters and sales representatives to get proposals out to brokers. The pay got better and the work had been okay, but I felt that I could do more, but I didn’t know what to do. So I heard about Data Science being a good field and the my company’s tuition reimbursement program and thought I would try that, since the program was online, I could also take electives in MBA or Health Care Administration courses and I wouldn’t hurt financially as long as I passed. Fast forward to today, where I have three more courses until I graduate with the master’s degree, but I need to take one that is an elective this fall and two more next year so my employer can pay for the two remaining courses. The problem I have is that after doing some of the work with actuaries and analysts at my company, there appears to be a learning curve with learning from them remotely, since our main offices aren’t in Chicago and I am no where near where they are at with their analytical abilities. (We have a small office in Chicago but nobody is really on the same team and we all work from home a few days each week.) I am not a math person, but I work hard to try and learn things. I am not big on being in a small office and learning a new role remotely. I have to stay until the end of July so that I don’t owe my company anything, but I also don’t know if I want an analyst position, to try to work in health care on the business side (something in either purchasing or with data, for instance) and use my data science training to solve business problems at a hospital or insurer and if I should get a job at a Chicago based organization so I can be around people more often, learn from others in an office, earn more so I can support a family (my wife and I bought a house last year), see if the next company will pay for the two remaining courses and hopefully have more job satisfaction. There are times where I wish I figured things out earlier in life and that I wish I could be on my feet for a living or help people doing something like nursing, counseling or physical therapy, but I don’t know how I would make a living to support our responsibilities if I retrained (my wife will also be doing a graduate program to boost her earnings and she wants kids soon) and if I would even be good at those things (I was a C+/B- student at best in those courses in high school). These are also jobs people that I know have and have enjoyed success in terms of job satisfaction and financially, but these are just recent thoughts in the past year or so and weren’t things I really considered until then. Long story short, I guess I am wondering if I should make the job change soon and if I am going about things in a good way by reaching out to people in different industries in health care, am working on data science projects and am trying to learn coding on my own, even if I will never be a data scientist and would use the skills I have in a different role. I would love to have job satisfaction, make more money and keep my options open in case I decide to do a career change in the future. I have also done several informational interviews with the industries I am interested in and will continue to do so. I’m also open to suggestions if anyone has any.

Jack, what about checking out some technical writing jobs or even seeing if you can get a certification at a community college that would lead to employment? Also, I may have a post for all of you because I too have a career dilemma and can’t seem to figure it out.

Will Collins be next or will he get actual catching and not just DHing time?

Nice work ladies! I’ll be curious to see if they are invited to the White House and if they actually go. If they don’t, it’ll be a huge statement for a national team not to go. And yes, I went there.

Can the Sox Twitter account not mention Scott Carroll and Dylan Cease in the same sentence? It’s like a bad omen. What was everyone’s impressions of his first start? I missed it but it looked like he got in trouble with walks and then settled in with the exception of a long ball.

We had tickets to the first game of a double header and could have stayed for the second one. We only paid for parking once and left our cars there while we went to the Bridgeport bars. I think you will just need tickets for one game and then have one parking pass.