Dream Job

Salary has been removed from the decision, which is the only way to make this question interesting rather than merely practical.

What is left is a choice between three kinds of appeal that are easy to confuse with one another. Some of these jobs are about the work itself — surgery, sound engineering, architecture — all absorbing regardless of where they happen to take place. Some are about the setting, which is most of why marine biologist and park ranger poll as well as they do. And a few are really about the identity, where the appeal is being able to say the word rather than do the thing. Astronaut is roughly eighteen months of training for eight days in orbit, and it wins rounds anyway.

What you get is thirty-two jobs, drawn from across the range rather than from the top of a salary table. Several of them are genuinely difficult to get into and the bracket does not care about that either. The format has an uncomfortable habit of separating the job someone wants from the job they would actually tolerate. Novelist and travel writer arrive carrying enormous romantic weight and both tend to fall the moment a voter pictures the real daily shape of either one.