SCHUYLKILL HAVEN - Penn State Schuylkill invited several area business and community leaders to the campus Monday for a career panel called "I Want Your Job."
Made up of eight participants, the panel included people from numerous fields including health care, law, insurance, government, education, agriculture and business.
While all were from different careers, many of the panelists said they took different routes to get to where they are today but all through hard work.
The first of the panelists to speak was Carol Bilinski, a pediatrician who has had her own practice, Blue Mountain Pediatrics, Schuylkill Haven, for more than 20 years.
Bilinski said she got her start at Penn State Schuylkill, transferred to the main campus at University Park and eventually continued on to Hershey Medical Center.
"I think Penn State is a great place to start out," Bilinski said.
Linda Pellish, a Pottsville attorney, spoke of how her career was more of a progression than a pursuit.
She started working as a system and financial analyst before eventually getting into law, starting with personally injury accident law, wills, estates, real estate and family law.
"I found that the more I went into family law, the more frustrated I got at not being able to help people, which I felt was one of the reasons I was there in the first place and decided there had to be another path to help people when they're restructuring families," Pellish said. "So I got into mediation work 10 years ago and have trained extensively in that. That brought me into collaborative practice."
Glen Ebert, owner of Walton-Ebert Insurance, Cressona, was one panelist who went through a multitude of career changes.
While Ebert said that he was an accomplished trumpet player, wanting to play for the Blue Band at Penn State, his mother wanted him to go into law. He thought of working in the medical field and eventually became a critical care nurse.
From the 1980s, he began to get into insurance, while still working in the nursing field. In 1994, he went into insurance full time when he and his wife purchased her father's insurance company.
"Whatever you choose to do, just be your best at it," Ebert said. "You never know what opportunities may present themselves."
One of the panelists who worked in the business field and experienced numerous changes to his career path was Greg Covell, owner of Everlast Roofing, which specializes in metal roofs.
Covell, who started Everlast Roofing in 1996, said that he was first interested in accounting then psychology and wasn't sure what he wanted to do with a psychology degree.
Spending a summer in Schuylklill Haven, he took a $6 per hour job which got him into the roofing business.
He eventually learned that one way to get what you want is to work hard and pay your dues.
"If you help enough people get what they want, then you'll get what you want," Covell said.
He also said that while he works in the metal roofing business, he uses the skills he used in his psychology classes everyday while managing people.
"I think I'm a better business owner because of my psych degree," he said.