Why Astrobiologists Are Cool, and Lawyers Are Not.

So, you’ve left college, you’ve done your degree in media and pottery, you’ve taken your gap year, and the bills are starting to pile up from the bank and credit card companies. Worse still, your parents are beginning to get on your back. So what are your options? Well, they’re limited frankly, because you’re got very little from pretty much nowhere. But you have made one smart move. In return for a few minutes of your time I’m going to keep you from having to flip burgers for a living, and help you get a cool job.

Unless you marry rich, or are going to inherit, everybody has to work, agreed? That being the case, logically, you might as well do something cool. Tell someone you are an astrobiologist and they will instantly like you. Tell them you are a lawyer and they will think you are a slime-ball. A rich slime-ball admittedly, but still a slime-ball. Rule number one: Cool jobs have nothing to do with how much you earn. Having said that, a cool job has to provide you with an income, otherwise it’s not a job, it’s a hobby.

So what exactly is a cool job? A good test is when you are at a party and someone asks you what you do. If when you tell them their eyes light up and they genuinely want to know more, its probably cool. Astrobiologists study all aspects of life in the universe: Its origin, evolution, and the possibility of life being distributed throughout the solar system. If that’s not cool I don’t know what is! Space is cool. There are loads of other examples too. Entertainment is cool. Animals are cool. Travel is cool. Spiritual is cool. The ocean is cool. Danger is cool.

There are hundreds of cool jobs you can do besides astrobiologist, and people will love you for it. And it gets better; even you can get some of them. Not all of them I admit, but some. There are jobs that pay hundreds of thousands a year, and some that pay minimum wage. But what they all have in common is they are cool. Regarding the first paragraph, of course I could be completely wrong here. You might not be a student, you might just be fed up with your current job, or in one of dozens of other situations that call for a change of career.