What do you do for a living?

I’m an investment consultant for TD Ameritrade.

How would you describe what you do?

I would say that my goal is to contact high net worth clients in regards to their investment strategies, and make sure that they’re doing everything they can as far as investment strategy goes to reach their financial goals.  I basically analyze their situation, consult, and I’m not giving specific recommendations per se for stocks, bonds etc., I give them advice advice on channels that our company has available to them, and see if one of those advice channels might be fit their needs. I get them in touch with advisors who can make recommendations, or help them through our market watchers and our portfolio managers to build accounts or customize their portfolios to fit their needs.

What does your work entail?

Typically, I work eight to five Monday through Friday. The schedule is pretty flexible depending on the manager. And being a sales position, they don’t micromanage you too much, so you still kind of have that feeling like you are your own boss in a certain way.  Continue Reading …

What do you do for a living?

I own an insurance agency.

How would you describe what you do?

I sell personal insurance mainly; auto, home, and life insurance. It’s eighty percent sales, twenty percent management.

What does your work entail?

It’s pretty much sales. You have to get prospects then figure out if they’re people that need what you have. Then you have to figure out if they’re going to be profitable and that they aren’t going to cause you all kinds of problems because insurance is kind of like a loan. You can’t get people that are not going to pay their bills.

It’s good for somebody that say, went to college, moves back home, doesn’t ever want to move, wife’s happy there, and is like, "I’m going to build a career here that I can have forever and get a lot of free time and go watch my kids play ball." It’s long-term. It’s a jog, not a sprint.

Pretty much from there it’s just selling the deal and closing the deal, and managing it, keeping customer service for the people that bought from you.

How did you get started?

My family had been it.

What do you like about what you do?

Freedom. I own my own business. I can go do whatever I want to do, work whenever I want to. Continue Reading …

What do you do for a living?

My actual title is called a Respiratory Care Account Manager, but the job description is actually selling critical care and surgical type products in the hospitals and surgery centers.

How would you describe what you do?

The people I call on within the hospital for the products I carry range from anesthesiologists, to surgeons, to nursing staff, critical care, intensive care units, and then also into the purchasing department and the administration. Not very often, but sometimes CEO’s and CFO’s of hospitals. My main two products are types tracheotomy and endotracheal tubes. The tracheotomy tubes are basically a product for patients that go home and have trouble with some type of upper respiratory abnomally or problem. And the endotracheal tube line is more for surgeries.

A lot of people think that because we’re out there selling different products and pharmaceutical companies are selling all these different drugs that it’s driving our insurance up really high…in one sense you can look at us and say ‘yeah it does’…But I guess at the end of the day if you are on your deathbed do you want a product that is from Target, or do you want a product that has been in research and development for a long time and has had some of the best scientists in the world world looking at it?

The doctor administers the anesthesia and once the patient is anesthetized they keep them alive by a ventilator which is connected to the endotracheal tube.

What does your work entail?

It really entails knowing your customer’s very well, knowing what they do really helps you. I come from a nonclinical background in college. I have a double major in marketing and management, and I knew I wanted to get into medical device sales so I took a few premed classes, anatomy and physiology, some basic type classes to kind of get me a little bit of a jump start. It really helps me to know exactly what the doctor’s, or nurse’s, job responsibilities are. It allows me to just be able to communicate with them better. It’s actually a great job for those that are independent and self driven. I basically can wake up whenever I want. I work out of my home office here, and I basically run a territory. Continue Reading …

What do you do for a living?

I’m a Pharmaceutical Sales Rep for Pfizer.

How would you describe what you do?

I would describe it as a sales person calling on doctors and my job is to get doctors to use the drugs that I’m selling. And I have four products, so I have to get them to write my four products for the patients. 

What does your work entail?

You see anywhere between 10 and 15 doctors a day for 5 days in a week. You call on those doctors who are the biggest prescribers, so I would look at a computer

You’re offering a product that a lot of times, people don’t believe in and you have to make them believe in that product because if your product wasn’t superior to most other products, it wouldn’t be out here.

and look at a doctor’s profile and if they have a lot of potential to write my products, I target those doctors and try to get those doctors to write my product.  During the work week, you travel a lot. Some territories are bigger than others, but mine’s about two hours long, so some days I’m two hours away from home in a small town calling on a small clinic or there’s other days when I’m in a bigger city and I call on the doctors there. Continue Reading …

What do you do for a living?

I’m a commerical painter.

What does your work entail?

I started out doing everything, doing all the painting, getting the estimates, getting the estimate turned in, getting all the paint, have it delivered to the job site, then actually do the work, finish and make sure the client is happy, then get your payment, deposit that and record all this process all while hoping that in the middle of that job you are booking other jobs. So that got to be a challenge which is where having the guys helped out because now basically all I do is go out and do the estimating and the invoicing and then just quality check. So, rather than eight hours of my day spent actually doing the labor, I’m going around trying to continue the booking process and the invoicing and all that work.

How did you get started?

I was in school Continue Reading …

What do you do for a living?

I’m a speech pathologist.

How would you describe what you do?

I primarily work with the geriatric population helping people

I enjoy just talking with the patients. I love the elderly…I love hearing and laughing at their stories, that’s the best part.

had strokes, swallowing difficulties, or who have cognition impairments.

What does your work entail?

I usually work from 7 to 3. I work in a nursing home. I usually see anywhere from 7 to 10 patients a day. I see most of my patients in the morning, see some at meals. There’s lots of paperwork involved and lots of notes…that’s about it. It’s between 36 to 40 hours per week. Continue Reading …

What do you do for a living?

I’m a meat cutter.   I own a meat shop.

How would you describe what you do?

Basically, I bring boxed beef in, put it on the block, break it down, cut and trim it,  then retail it.

What does your work entail?

Setting the counter, unloading trucks, and waiting on customers. I cut beef, pork, chicken. Customers call in and they tell me how many steaks they want and how thick they want them, or what weight of roast they want.  We do wild game processing.  I work about nine hour days, pretty well staying at six days a week. I would say cutting meat is probably about a four hours of the day, and the rest of the time is paperwork, cleaning up, and waiting on customers. 

People are not wanting prefab meat. They’re not wanting stuff that’s been injected with solutions and shot with carbon dioxide to keep it from changing colors. They want something fresh cut.

Most shops stay anywhere from 35 to 42 degrees working temperature. You’ll spend four hours a day in there and if you work in a grocery store you’ll spend eight hours a day.  You don’t notice the temperature.  You become very accustomed to it.  I wear shorts and short sleeves year round. I’ve been in it since I was 16. Most people will be chilled where I work, I’m not chilled. My freezer is set at minus 10, and its cold in there. High speed fans, about 35 miles per hour fans, you step in there it is cold. You can freeze a coke in about 10 minutes.

How did you get started?

Continue Reading …

What do you do for a living?

I’m a Farrier.

How would you describe what you do?

A Farrier is someone that put shoes on horses and corrects faults in the foot.

What does your work entail?

Well, my job entails me showing up at someone’s house, or them coming to my shop to get shoes put on their horse, or trim their horse’s foot, whichever the case may be. You can set your own hours because you work for yourself. It’s probably about 50 or 60 hours a week because when you get home you’re not done, you’ve got to answer calls that come in from clients later on.

How did you get started?

Well, how I got started in this is I was cleaning tile floor down in Little Rock and I couldn’t find anyone down there that’d come and shoe my old ex-wives horse.

From the leg down a Farrier probably knows more about a horse’s anatomy than a Veterinarian.

I was tired of working at night so I went to shoeing school. And I’ve been shoeing off and on for the last 17 years.

What do you like about what you do?

Continue Reading …

What do you do for a living? I’m a pharmacist. Hospital Pharmacist.

How would you describe what you do?

I do order entry of physician orders for the medications that they want to administer in the hospital. There’s the patient chart where the doctor will document and write everything that’s going on with the patient and all the medications and tests and procedures that he wants done. When a medication is written it is faxed to the pharmacy where a pharmacist will review the patient’s allergies, other medications that they’re taking, and appropriateness of the dose. We then enter that into a computer system which goes through a pharmacy database and a robot which is linked to that database

There’s a lot of difference between a Walgreen’s and a hospital pharmacy, and I would work in both before I’d ever think about being a pharmacist.

will fill those prescriptions as well as technicians that work within the pharmacy will manually fill those prescriptions and then distribute them to the right patients.

What does your work entail?

Continue Reading …

What do you do for a living?

I fly 53-echoes in the Marines, they’re a helicopter.

How would you describe what you do?

You go to work, fly for a while, do a lot of paperwork bullshit and then you go home.

What does your work entail?

The last three years I’ve been in training and I’m just now complete with that, so up till now it’s been studying a whole lot. You have to study and get ready for briefs and while I’ve been in flight school that’s what you do basically; get ready, study systems, emergency procedures, aerodynamics, and stuff like that and then you go brief with an instructor. Kind of a one-on-one with someone that’s typically about 5 years older than you that’s been to Iraq a couple of times. Then you go fly for a few hours, land, de-brief and go home and that’s pretty much what I’ve been doing. While I was in flight school down at Pensacola I was probably working maybe 15 hours a week of actual real work and it wasn’t even real work. We didn’t have any kind of job except for flying, that was it. I was with the Navy and I trained with the Air Force too. Now I’m back with the Marines. In the Marines you have a ground job too and my job is operations, I write the schedule. The first month I was there it was about 14 hours a day, 5 days a week so it sucked.

it gets boring flying(jets) when you never see the ground, you’re not going to get shot at, you’re not going to drop that many bombs anymore so…I wanted to fly helicopters, and that’s why I got into helicopters

And it was all paperwork and there was 270 people in the squadron, like half a billion dollars worth of aircraft, writing the schedule for that kind of gets stressful.  When I get out(of training) and get to what we call the “fleet” the “fleet range force” I’ll check in and I’ll get some job. I don’t know what kind of job it will be but probably a few hours a day on a ground job, a few hours a day flying, and a few hours working out or something. It’s not a typical 9 to 5 job. Continue Reading …