If you had asked me before tonight if anyone spends their career researching the history of fat I would have probably said no. I would have been wrong because today’s Rose Café speaker does in fact study the history of fats as a career. While the speaker talked eloquently about the history of fat my biggest take away from the talk was that some people make a living studying the history of fat. This got me thinking about all the other interesting a niche career paths that people take. Most of my neighbors, family members, and friends have more typical careers such a lawyer, doctor, teacher, psychologic, engineer, accountant, and more. I rarely run across a person whose job is so out of the ordinary that it makes me rethink the breadth of possible career choices; historian of fats happens to be one of the careers that made me rethink the breadth of possible career choices.

I have met a few people with out-of-the-ordinary career choices. For example, one of my neighbors was worked for a TV channel and his job involved a large amount of watching TV. When I was in middle school, this sounded like a pretty cool job to me. I have also met people whose job is to test a popular video game. When I heard, this I imagined them playing the game in big reclining chairs for eight hours a day. However, they actually test the game programmatically without playing it too much.

Perhaps I rarely meet people with unique jobs because people explain their jobs in relatively plain terms even if their work is quite distinctive. For example, I wonder if tonight’s speaker would introduce himself as a historian rather than as a historian focusing on fats.