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Jake Fields January 29th 2009 Career Project __ Summary __ For my career project I chose to interview two pretty successful car mechanics and technicians. It was very difficult for me to choose and occupation and im not positive how I ended up here. Leslie Hansen was the first person I interviewed. Mr. Hansen is and auto body technician at Burt Chevrolet. However he is a Ford man himself. A very easy person to converse with Mr. Hansen let me in on a lot of good information. Person number two was Byron Martin of Byron’s Computerized Automotive. He as well was very talkative on his occupation and had a lot in common with Mr. Hansen. Prepared with multiple questions ready to fire at them, they were ready to give me straight and complete answers. Putting a large amount of emphasis on questioning them about writing in their occupation they both had similar answers. Mr. Hansen proclaimed “writing is a big part of my job because often times I have to fill out reports of the repairs I have done, so being illiterate is out of the question.” Similarly stated by Mr. Martin “Often customers need a detailed report of what I fixed in their car, what was wrong with it and even what I used or how I did it.” With one of my interviewees being his own boss and business owner it intrigued questions relating to business. Mr. Martin stated that “I took business, and management classes as well as my necessary classes to be a refined mechanic.” Mr. Hansen who is not a small business owner told me “Getting the right degrees and all the necessary components it would be a defendant possibility to start ones own shop”. Although two different people with different but similar jobs they had a lot of the same knowledge for me on the subject of their occupations.

__Response__ Listening and reporting on the interviews of these jobs was a good experience. However it made me really not want to ever do them. One reason that is Mr. Martin didn’t really encourage it, he felt as thought it had been his calling. “I’ve always had a knack for this kind of thing.” On top of that I felt like fixing cars would be a better hobby than a career. Not to say anything against mechanics, but it just doesn’t seem like it’s for me. Off the negativity topic, I learned a lot of things. Things I learned were the mechanics and body technician parts of the occupation but I also learned about managing and possibilities. Byron Martin runs his own mechanic shop called Byron’s Computerized Automotive. For this to happen he told me that “ you would need management degrees and business degrees plus the mechanic part of the trio.” Also when I talked to Mr. Hansen he informed me that although he doesn’t run his own shop it would be a defendant option if he wanted it to be. I think that bad working hours would be one of the worst parts of a job, and with this job both people told me they had regular 40 hour weeks plus what you want to do on top of that. That was pretty good news, if they had said that they work long into the night or extremely early in the morning I might have thrown up in my mouth a little bit. A really interesting thing that Mr. Martin told me was “some times the cards play out and some times they don’t.” I though it was pretty interesting because he had said that when I asked him how location was and that is pretty much how he responded. So ill take it as you could have the best business in anything but if your not in a smart place it might not even work out. Neither Byron nor Mr. Hansen had a lot of exciting or crazy things happen in their jobs, but they both said that it is very cool to see the changes in technology and types of cars that they get to work on. It was a great experience getting to know these two and getting to ask them these questions, however again I don’t think that this occupation is the one for me.