From what I've seen so far, when you go into a career it's usually about solving problems. So then if you know yourself in terms of what kinds of problems you like solving will help you figure out what kind of career you'd thrive in.

For example, I call myself a 'process optimizer'. The world is chaos, yet I still try to come up with ways to establish order (although rather Sisyphean). I thrive when there's processes where I can optimize through iteration:

• When I was managing the vision science lab, I got a kick out of improving the volunteer recruitment protocol.
• When I was running visual analytics workshops, I had so much fun refining the curriculum for the next round.
• When I was managing various parts of a no-kill animal charity, I got really excited coming up with strategies to improve our donor retention for the coming year.
• Now, as someone running an academic program, I'm looking for ways to strengthen the alumni community.
• And in all these aforementioned jobs, I work on optimizing my own schedule - if I know that some months will be busier than other months, I try to move things around so that the workload is spread out more evenly in manageable chunks.

So if I'm put in a situation where 1) there's no process so I need to build from scratch, 2) there's no time to optimize processes, and 3) I don't have the autonomy to optimize my own processes, I become unhappy.

Over the past several years, I learned that I may be a good firefighter (in the figurative sense) but it takes years off my life; can't do it for long. I can also build processes from scratch but it's not something I love doing because if the requirements are unclear, that will significantly reduce your success rate (<rant> people tend to misunderstand what "requirements" means. They jump to solutions which are not the requirements. </rant> It takes a LOT of patience and persistence to eke out those requirements, and I admit that I'm simply not patient enough).

What problems do you like solving?

I failed to write for the last few Saturdays because I had underestimated how much effort it takes to adjust to a new job (^__^;) Now that it has been over 1 month since I started, I can say that I have mostly adjusted.

One of the things I've been (re-)adjusting to is the speed in which things happen, and I am astounded by how different the pace of life is in an academic setting vs. a small not-for-profit-scaling-up setting.

In academia (especially in large institutions), things happen very slowly - some things happen over the course of weeks, other things take years. When I used to work in academia (2 jobs ago, as someone who had been running and managing visual analytics workshops) I found this process painful, but there were some things about that slowness that I now appreciate being back in academia:

1. Predictability - since school runs in terms, the behavior of the system is very predictable (e.g. when students are figuring out their courses, when students have exams, when professors and TA's are busy marking).
2. Timelines - there are dates in school when things happen / when things need to be done by (e.g. when each term starts, when the course add/drop deadline is, when rooms for courses need to be booked, when are course evaluations due), and that information is available way in advance). Since events are predictable because timelines exist, this allows me to plan when to do what so that I don't have a ton of things on my plate at the same time.
3. Cyclic schedule - fall term, spring term, summer term, then fall term comes again. This gives me the chance to optimize systems and processes through iteration.

In the small-not-for-profit-scaling-up setting, the nature of work was far more chaotic than what I expected:

1. Some aspects of running a charity are predictable, like how tax receipts need to be issued by tax season of the following year. But to me, that was one of the very few things that were predictable. There were numerous occasions where I come to work and a new project is on my plate (and since that project has to do with the organization's expansion, it's usually a big one).
2. Timelines exist but are rarely followed because there's so many projects going on simultaneously. When everything (both existing projects and new initiatives) is a priority, it quickly becomes impossible to prioritize and plan ahead. Reality hits - you can't do everything at once. You do one thing, and the other thing falls behind even if you don't want it to.
3. When a small not-for-profit scales up, what you do is mostly expansion projects (and trying to figure out how to maintain everything else when your time is mostly spent on expansion), it's very difficult to find time to iterate and improve on existing processes.

I am definitely a tortoise when it comes to pace of work. I found myself more comfortable and less anxious when there's a stable timeline that recurs so that I can refine systems for the next iteration. I know friends who would get bored out of their minds if they were in the same situation (GOTTA GO FAST)! What pace of work do you prefer?