Interesting Careers

If you do not mind getting into a dangerous profession and you like the sound of getting up close and personal with active, dormant or extinct volcanoes, you could become a volcanologist. As a volcanologist, you will travel to some remote corners of the globe to study these destructive forces of nature, predicting eruptions and quite possibly saving lives. Volcanologist's work covers a number of scientific fields, including geography, geology and earth sciences and chemistry. Any of these subjects at undergraduate level will give you a good foundation for becoming a volcanologist and after this you will become more specialize with the addition of further study at masters and PhD level. Volcanologists are employed by universities for research and teaching, as well as governments for monitoring and hazard reduction. You also have the option of working at a volcano observatory, monitoring a specific volcano to ensure that an emergency response can be coordinated in plenty of time in the event of a possible eruption.

Roofers work on pitched, uneven surfaces high above the ground, often without anything to catch them if they should fall. And since one of their jobs is the repair of roofs, they are also at risk from the very damage they are there to fix. Rotten wood, loose tiles and structural collapse have all contributed to the danger of keeping the inside in. And once more, there is the weather to contend with. Sure, it is nice to be outside and get a breath of fresh air but when that fresh air turns into a violent wind and you are fifty feet above the ground on an angled, slippery surface, the niceness quickly fades. And when a gentle rain can turn the surface you are standing on into a playground slide that does not end in a soft landing, the risks of roofing are readily apparent.

If you think you would be good at articulate speeches, rigorous cross-examinations and lightning-fast thinking, a career as a barrister could be for you. The route to this profession starts with a university degree. This does not have to be in law, you could study something else and then complete a conversion course. This is followed by the official bar professional training course, which can be completed in a year full-time or two years part-time. After that you will enter the Pupil age phase, during which you will spend a year as a pupil in a barrister's chambers or other approved organisation. You will then be able to start practicing, either self-employed or in an existing practice.

Figuring out how someone unexpectedly and potentially violently, met their end may be grizzly work, but it is also morbidly fascinating. It is been glamorized by television shows, but despite this the number of people practicing forensic pathology is surprisingly small. If this is a career that interests you, you will have to go to medical school and complete foundation training. After graduating from medical school, you will need to start by studying histopathology (of which forensic pathology is a specialist branch), before taking an exam from the College of Pathologists and then moving on to forensic pathology in year two or three of post-graduate study, this post-graduate training will take five years in total.

A career as an airline pilot remains prestigious and desirable, with unrivaled travel opportunities and the best office view anybody could wish for. Contrary to popular belief, you do not actually need a maths degree to become an airline pilot, in fact, many people go straight from school into an airline training school. However, you will find some knowledge of maths and physics useful when embarking on the tough ground school elements of airline pilot training, as you will need to learn about the forces that keep an aeroplane in the air, calculate flight times and fuel consumption and so on. To become an airline pilot, you will have to complete fourteen rigorous exams, hundreds of hours of flight training and courses that will teach you how to work with an airline crew.

For many people, fishing is a fun, relaxing hobby consisting of lazy mornings at the lake wearing funny hats and using a tackle box. But commercial fishing is an entirely different sort of activity. At the mercy of the wind, waves and temperatures that can vary from sweltering to well below freezing, fishers sometimes pull long shifts in excess of twenty hours while battling the elements. Falling overboard during severe weather is also a dangerous prospect because not only does the crew have to battle the waves and winds but the overboard fisher has a limited time to avoid freezing while managing to stay afloat. Despite improvements in equipment and weather tracking systems, the effort to keep crab legs on the buffet menu continues to expose fishers to the dangers of the deep.

This is not at all a glamorous profession and it will certainly never develop the near mythological aura of heroism that fire-fighters or police officers have. But it is a dangerous job that seems to be done mostly by men. Not only is it necessary to prevent disease and vermin, being a garbage collector is surprisingly dangerous. Not only do they ride on the back of a moving vehicle, but it is a moving vehicle with filled with strange chemicals and rotting food that is equipped with dangerous crushing equipment to pack it all in. Next time you can not be bothered to keep your empty cans in the correct box, remember, the affably surly middle-aged guy in a jumpsuit who lectures you about sorting your recyclables actually puts his life on the line.

It is not really a surprise that disarming incendiary devices cobbled together with the intention of causing destruction can sometime blow up in your face, literally. Use of remote-controlled robots can sometimes minimize the risk but because those robots have a lower success rate of safely disarming bombs than a person does, many times it is necessary for people to put themselves in harm's way to ensure the safety of others but it is not all gloom and doom in this exciting career and plus they get a decent bomb squad salary. Bomb technicians have an incredible rate of success (Above 99% in most instances) and many of them live long, productive lives without so much as a singed eyebrow.

While the call of the open road and the solitude of the truck driver is something celebrated in country music, peace of mind and an endless stretch of scenery is not the only thing that comes with this interesting job that you can get without a degree. Despite many countries having strict laws requiring truckers to rest on their routes, pressure to make deliveries on time sometimes leads drivers to take the road without enough sleep. Studies have shown that sleep deprivation leads to serious impairment in tasks like driving. That same pressure to deliver also sometimes leads truckers to ignore speed limits and when you are barreling down a highway in a gigantic machine weighing multiple tons, physics tells us that it requires a lot of energy for that machine to stop. Given that those trucks also are at risk for mechanical failures and that they must contend with other drives on the road who don't understand what physics says about inertia, it is not surprising that road accidents are the main contributor to the danger of heading back on the road again for a truck driver.

When the power goes out, as it sometimes does, someone's there to see it comes back on. Who does this? In many cases it is an electrical power-line worker, climbing a wooden utility pole, or working in tight recesses underground to identify and repair the cause of the power outage. And while it does suck to miss the latest episode of Project Dance Idol Racers, the power-line workers are often in precarious positions to ensure that your lights come back on. One of the most common causes of power outages is severe weather, weather it is lightning strikes that overload a transformer, high winds that knock down power lines, or heavy rains that seep through to underground power conduits. The power-line worker has to work in those same conditions that caused the outages. Sometimes tethered to a a splintery utility pole while winds howl around her. And if the power's out where you are, chances are the power's out where she is fixing it, so all her work is done in the dark, except for the light she can bring on her own.