Fashion designer (Alamy)
Yoga instructor (Getty Images)
Day trader (Alamy)
Fashion designer
Q: Celebrity designers aside, what kind of annual salary can a decent fashion designer pull in?
A: The pay-scale varies widely depending on employment circumstances. Anywhere from $70,000 a year for a competent freelancer in a major metro area to $300,000 for a creative director position at a mainstream fashion label. Expect $0 if you’re in the first year of launching your own fashion business.
Investment banker
Q: What kind of social life can you keep with such crazy workweeks?
A: An unplannable, wildly inconsistent one. As many of my former colleagues noted, the difficulty in maintaining a social life while holding a banking job isn’t necessarily due to the sheer number of working hours, but rather the unpredictability of your schedule. For example, I may only work 60 hours per week on average, but I have almost no idea how those 60 hours will be distributed. This leads to quite a few canceled dates and get-togethers, so you really have to make sure your friends and loved ones are fully aware of the nature of the job if you want them to tough it out with you. Cliched as it sounds, bankers definitely subscribe to a “work hard, play hard” mentality. Even after a 16-hour day, if a one-to-two hour window opens to hit a bar with some friends or co-workers, the bankers are going to go hard even just for that brief period of time. They’re pent up from having been in the office for marathons on end, and they’ve got money to blow.
Yoga instructor
Q: Have you seen any romantic relationships come out of your yoga classes?
A: The studio that I originally worked at prohibited dating the students. I got hit on quite a bit, but never had the urge to date the students. I did date a couple of fellow teachers. There is a lot of that in the yoga world, believe it or not.
Day trader
Q: In trading, does an educated person (a k a someone with a degree or two) have any advantage over someone who’s got less schooling under his or her belt? Or is the high school dropout equally likely to succeed as the college graduate?
A: I think, weighing the totality of what I know and what I have seen, that it helps to be educated . . . but not that much. At my firm, the most successful guys are weighted more toward the former Ivy league types, but there are plenty of people who have almost no book smarts at all who have been successful. That said, I don’t think that a top degree or a top education is what makes those traders successful. I just think that people who are driven to succeed, who are willing to work hard and who generally have good work habits, are more likely to have been driven to succeed in both school and trading.
Bouncer
Q: What qualifications are required to get hired as a bouncer?
A: Number one is you have to be gigantic, which I am not (6 feet, 190 pounds). The owner told everyone I was a former Navy SEAL, and everyone was afraid of me. I was fine with that. Plus, most of the job is head games. If you have to get physical with someone (and we did), you aren’t doing your job right, or you are in a worst-case scenario. The whole point of the job is to make problems disappear, not escalate into brawls. Brawls are bad for business and draw the attention of the neighborhood and the cops. The place where I worked had lots of illegal stuff going on, so avoiding cops was a priority. That said, brawls do happen. Nowadays, in New York City anyway, you also have to have a security license, which costs about $200 and involves a background check.