A Career as a Meteorologist

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In the coming fall I will be pursuing my passion and career as a meteorologists at California University of Pennsylvania. As I approach the end of my senior year, many family members, family friends, friends, and adults have asked me the very innocent question, “What are your plans after high school?” or “What are you doing next year?”. I passionately respond that I am going to school for meteorology to pursue research. After I state this I hear responses such as “good for you”, “Oh, you want to be on TV”, “sounds interesting”, and “good luck”, and all the other generic college congratulatory remarks. However, I often hear the comments many meteorologists are jabbed with: “It must be nice to be 30% right and still get paid”, “I wish I could screw up at my job and not get fired”, “You have the best job, you can be completely wrong and still get paid”, and all variations of these listed above comments you can imagine. I typically just politely smile at the person who said these fighting words, and move on, however the more I think about these words my internal atmosphere becomes rather unstable.
Although I, like many professional meteorologists, know that these comments are small jokes, it does bother me that the public, or at least a mass of the public hold a common perception that meteorologists just cannot be correct with their forecasts. Maybe I am getting too defensive, but listen to me when I say meteorologists have the burden to predict the unknown. It is not an easy task, nor is the countless hours of physics, calculus, differential equations, exponential mathematics, and chemistry easy to comprehend and learn. Meteorologists take their jobs very seriously as they are essentially the ‘spokesman’ for the weather and an elit...

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...recast predicted by the meteorologist yielded roughly 76%-88% accuracy. These percents are within the accuracy limits the NWS suggests. So who is in fault the mayor or the meteorologists? In summation, meteorologists, are often confronted with jeering comments such as “You have the best job; you can be completely wrong and still get paid.” Recently, such comments have stirred me, and me think of reasons to prove these comments inconclusive. Meteorologists are ground-breaking scientists predicting the ever difficult future, well educated scientists with curriculums similar if not exactly the same as engineers, and meteorologists face the hardships with human natures foils such as selective listening and the disillusionment of perception.

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