What careers are most externally social but autonomous?

[EpicFailure]

I did several career tests and based on the results of what might be an ideal role for me, what role/industry/function do you think best unites the following?

- work involving lots of public relations and presence at events, trade shows, conferences;

- highly autonomous work rather than teamwork.

The most obvious answer to me is being self-employed (I don't want to be, see my other post with negative entrepreneurial experiences...) or an academic/research professor who does most of the research by himself or at most with a really small team, but after that moves a lot to present the work, travels around the world to discuss the ideas and always maintains a huge network of contacts.

At the moment, I am quite interested in that option, though I know it means taking a hard path (postgraduate, PhD, etc.).

Do you know of any other jobs/careers/roles/functions that fit the criteria I mentioned above?

Thank you

[Sparky]

Sales. Possibly marketing. In pharma people often flow back and forth between the two departments over the course of their career. But seriously, what you just described is SO much more like sales than academia. It's hard to be "externally social" when you spend 10 hours a day reading and just plain thinking!

[wheatGrass]

School teacher.

[mandarin.orange]

School teacher.

I respectfully disagree. Unless you find a plum of a job at a private school with excellent resources and room for electives in the course offerings. Otherwise, your curriculum has to conform to state standards. Often you need to plan and co-ordinate curriculum and common exams with other teachers (and thus, often-maddening groupthink and teamwork). And you can't leave the kids for a bathroom run. Scheduled pee-breaks don't really suggest "autonomy" to me...

I agree with the poster that mentioned pharma sales.

[wheatGrass]

I respectfully disagree. Unless you find a plum of a job at a private school with excellent resources and room for electives in the course offerings. Otherwise, your curriculum has to conform to state standards. Often you need to plan and co-ordinate curriculum and common exams with other teachers (and thus, often-maddening groupthink and teamwork). And you can't leave the kids for a bathroom run. Scheduled pee-breaks don't really suggest "autonomy" to me...

Unless you work for yourself, though, (which the OP specifically said was out of the question), you are always going to be working on accomplishing someone else's goals. A pharma sales person has to use specific promotional materials etc... to sell the products he or she has been hired to sell. So that's conformity, too, isn't it? They can't just decide they want to promote St. John's Wort instead of Zantax, or write a play about allergy medications to put on for the doctors.

In my experience, there is a fair amount of wiggle room in the proscribed curriculum... not in terms of the outcomes/objectives/expectations, but in terms of how you go about it. And sure, you might be stuck with an old or not great text book, but it is up to you how much you actually rely on it. And if you really need to pee you can ask someone to cover your class for 3 minutes.

I have not taught at the high school level, so I can't comment on collaborating with other teachers on exam preparation.