Careers reconsidered

By the early 1990s, Meredith found herself intrigued by reports about people working with rain-forest tribes to preserve a working knowledge of local plants. It led her to an interest in ethnobotany, the study of what people do with plants - even though she was still dancing and choreographing.

Eventually, she learned about a degree-and-certification program at the New York Botanical Gardens. "It really caught my eye," she says. But Meredith chose not to make an abrupt transition to a new career. She persuaded the director of one of the dance companies she worked for - a place where she had seniority - to let her cut back on her rehearsal time so she could start studying ethnobotany.

By 1998, with grant assistance from Career Transition for Dancers - the only US organization devoted to helping dancers find new careers - she started working toward an ethnobotany certificate at the botanical gardens. Along the way, she even began her own botanical business, Theia Bath Products.

This spring, some 10 years after first thinking about a career in ethnobotany, she'll receive her certificate from the botanical gardens. Even before graduation, she's been offered a job teaching ethnobotany at the gardens.

"There were two key things for me," she says of her transition. "One is to follow the things you're really interested in, that you care about, because anything else is going to be hard.

"The other," she says, "is that it doesn't have to be all or nothing. You don't have to jump off the cliff into change. You can mosey out of your old career into a new one."

By his late 20s, Jay Liwanag pretty much had it all, career-wise. A great job as a principal consultant with PricewaterhouseCoopers. Lots of international travel. A good salary. Long hours, but lots of fun, too. Exciting work that was, in his words, "a continuous learning process."

But when his mother passed away last year, Mr. Liwanag, who is single, began having second thoughts. The constant demands of his job had kept him away from his family during his mother's illness. He felt he'd missed something important, and began to ask himself, "Is what I'm doing worth it? Is this what I want to do?"

He recalled the words of an older colleague who once told him, "You don't want to find out that you've spent your whole career trying to get to the top only to find that you've been climbing the wrong ladder."

With the help of a career counselor at his firm - "a godsend," he says - Liwanag began to explore his values and interests in an effort to determine his real passions in life.

"I found that I wanted to do something that had meaning," he says. "I felt I wanted to go to a nonprofit or a university setting.... I wanted to do work that in the end, people would [say], 'Jay did this. He made a good impact on people in his life.' "

The events of Sept. 11 prompted further soul-searching, and by the time Liwanag was laid off from his job at PwC in late October, he knew it was time to make a change.

He began looking at nonprofit work and recently landed a job as human resources lead with Mitretek Systems, a Washington, D.C.-area nonprofit firm that works with technology to help the public.

The new job meant less pay, but also fewer hours, which gives Liwanag more time to pitch in as a soccer coach for local kids and to volunteer as a counselor with the American Cancer Society. "Last year was the worst year of my life," he says. "I tried to turn that into a positive. I didn't want to be doing the same old thing every day. Maybe now I'm thinking more in terms of legacy."

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