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Someone asked me recently “How’d you come to decide that radiation therapy technology is for you?”. Here’s a brief answer.

For the last couple years I’ve been having a harder and harder time finding good work. I started out of college way back doing software QA (Quality Assurance) work. As proofreaders are for books, QA is for computer software. It went well enough but after many years I got tired of always being a critic and never actually MAKING anything. When I moved to San Francisco about 6 years ago, I saw a couple things happening. For one, my tech skills were not staying current and I didn’t feel the passion I once had to keep them updated. I found that I really loved working on some large art projects in the Bay Area. I realized that, yeah, building stuff is cathartic. I’ve found a few jobs building things, I’m a Department Head at the Crucible, I helped and install some fancy cameras last year. But one thing I realized was that I needed to do something quite active in order to keep this up. I considered becoming a full time mechanical artist, or getting a mechanical engineering degree, or just finding a career that would be good and afford me the time and money to pursue my desires.

So this past June my dad called me up and told me about a newspaper article he read about Radiation Therapy. He relayed from the article that the career required someone that is very good with people and comfortable with technology, had limited hours (9-5-ish), paid well, the field had excellent growth and low unemployment projections for the next 20 years, a reasonable path into the career (a 2 year degree) and… well, he thought I should look into it. So I did! I’m a bit concerned how I’ll handle the patients of mine that don’t survive treatment (if you pick that up, this is radiation treatments mostly for people with cancer) but I’ve been speaking with people and I’m getting ready to volunteer in a hospital to get more of a feel for it so… it’ll all work out.