"Do what you love and you'll never work a day in your life." It's good advice you should take seriously as you start down the road of choosing a career. Don't ignore the practical aspects of careers, like money, advancement opportunity and professional prestige, but don't become too focused on them, either. The career you choose now could define the next 40 or so years of your life. If you're not happy, nothing else will matter.

So what makes you happy? What intrigues and entertains you? What would you like to do all day, even if you didn't get paid for it? How about watch cartoons! That would be a pretty good way to earn a living. Okay, you probably can't get paid to just watch cartoons, but you can certainly get paid to make them. Animation is big business.

Make no mistake; cartoons aren't kid stuff. Animated films, as they're more accurately known, are extremely complex ventures that require the talents of hundreds of people. Animators are the colorful tip of a very large iceberg. Feature-length animated films take years to make and cost millions of dollars. In fact, it has been a long time since a major animated film was made for less than $100 million. The highly successful animated film, the 2003 Disney-Pixar production Finding Nemo, earned more than $400 million at the box office and has been the best-selling DVD in history. That's an excellent return on an initial investment of about $130 million. Animators are the key to the animation business. Skilled and dedicated artists, animators must possess both the discipline and maturity to become great artists and the childlike wonder to devote their skills to the fantasy world of animated films. It's a happy way to work, if you have it in you. If you think you'll grow out of cartoons, this is probably not for you. If you can't imagine a life without them, keep going. The animation business is in a state of rapid evolution, closing some doors and opening new ones every day. Traditional hand-drawn animation is giving way to digital animation. Animators are using new tools and new skills. The number of jobs is shrinking somewhat while the artistic possibilities are expanding rapidly for those who master the new techniques. Animation is a very competitive field, and you'll have to work very hard to succeed. But if you want to enter a field that will keep you at the forefront of the film and video industry for the next few decades, animation is a very good choice.

Take careful note of the information contained in this report. If you like what you read, look into a few of the resources listed on the last page. You'll find a wealth of information to help you in your search for the perfect career. You can never know too much.

The practice of medicine is both ancient and universal. Where ever there are sick people, there are respected individuals in the community who use special knowledge to cure disease and ease pain. In primitive cultures, these individuals may be shamans or medicine men. But in developed civilizations, from the ancient Egyptians to today, medical care has been provided by highly-educated physicians.

Anesthesiologists are physicians who specialize in the prevention and treatment of pain. About five percent of all physicians are anesthesiologists. Unless you have had an operation, you may never have encountered an anesthesiologist. Anesthesiologists administer anesthetics before and during surgery and other medical procedures so the patient will feel no pain. Each year, more than 25 million surgical procedures are performed in the United States. These surgical procedures would not be possible without modern anesthesia techniques that block the pain of surgery. Your body includes a network of billions of nerve cells that interconnect with your brain and spinal cord. Through this network, electrochemical signals transmit information to the brain, including pain messages.

Anesthesiologists use three different types of anesthesia - local, regional, and general - to interrupt these pain signals. In general anesthesia, you are unconscious and have no awareness or other sensations. Some general anesthetic drugs are gases or vapors inhaled through a breathing mask or tube; others are medications administered through a vein. During general anesthesia, anesthesiologists carefully monitor patients using sophisticated equipment to track major bodily functions. In most operations using general anesthesia, specialized equipment is used to actually control the patient's every breath. This is because certain medications temporarily decrease breathing capability, which is further reduced by necessary muscle relaxants. At the conclusion of surgery, the anesthesiologist reverses the process and the patient regains consciousness. With regional anesthesia, the anesthesiologist makes an injection near a cluster of nerves to numb the area of the body that requires surgery. The patient may remain awake, but does not see or feel the actual surgery. Two of the most frequently used regional anesthesia are spinal anesthesia and epidural anesthesia, which are produced by injections made with great exactness in the appropriate areas of the back. They are frequently preferred for childbirth and prostate surgery.

In local anesthesia, the anesthetic drug is usually injected into the tissue to numb just the specific location of the body requiring minor surgery, for example, on the hand or foot. If you become an anesthesiologist, you will interact with surgeons and pediatricians. You will also work with radiologists on diagnostic procedures such as angiograms. Unlike most other physicians, you probably will not spend a significant portion of your day seeing patients by appointment in your office. Anesthesiologists may specialize in a variety of different areas, such as cardiac or pediatric anesthesia. Through experience and additional training you may become an expert in a subcategory of anesthesiology. However, there are only two recognized subspecialties with separate board certification - pain management and critical care.

Today, anesthesiologists are not limited only to hospital operating rooms. An increasing number of surgical procedures are performed safely on an outpatient basis. This means that patients have surgery and go home on the same day. Same day surgery frequently is performed in an ambulatory surgical center. Anesthesiologists who specialize in pain management may work in pain management centers or hospital wards, treating patients with acute and chronic pain. Anesthesiology is a challenging career where new opportunities continue to develop as new treatment methods are discovered.