Dear god, if you have the people skills to manage a classroom full of teenagers, and the pedagogical skills to teach stuff, software engineering needs you. Can

Dear god, if you have the people skills to manage a classroom full of teenagers, and the pedagogical skills to teach stuff, software engineering needs you. Can I interest you in the Drupal project? ;) I know one person who used his new B.S. in Physics to Teach for America, and was unhappy. I know another person who loved to work with kids, worked for years in a science museum, then got a degree in education and worked as a high school teacher in a rural county, and is now... unhappy. I think that teaching is like medicine, law, marriage counseling, postdoctoral research, and just about any other career: It's hard to know if you'll like it until you try it for real. You can't really learn what it's like, day-to-day and year-to-year, by watching from the outside. I've certainly met teachers who loved their jobs, but you have to love the reality, not the Platonic ideal in your head. Honesty, if not my sense of social justice, compels me to observe that the long-term happiness of the teachers I've met has been correlated to the selectiveness of their schools -- they work at Catholic schools with tuition, magnet schools, private schools, or schools in districts where only doctors and lawyers can afford to live. I think the main reason for this is that the students in such schools are relatively well motivated: they either care about the material or care about their grades. (It's not just pay -- the Catholic school teachers I knew were paid considerably less than their public-school colleagues. But then, if you've read Peopleware, you could have predicted that.) The happiest hacker-turned-high-school-teacher I know started off in industry, burned out after a couple of decades, then switched to teaching. You might consider that path. OTOH, the advantage of Teach for America is that it gets you in front of students (a) quickly, without having to go through as much bureaucratic hazing -- no education degree required; (b) temporarily -- you can quit in a couple years with no dishonor; and (c) when you're young, so that it will have minimal impact on your future career.