I'd like to talk about my former classmate Wei, who I studied with at a university in Kunming, in south-west China. He works as a professional tea taster, which surprises almost everyone I mention it to.
His job involves tasting hundreds of cups of tea a week, mostly Pu'er tea, which comes from our province. He works for a tea company and visits farms in the mountains, judges the quality of each harvest, decides on prices, and helps create blends. He can identify which mountain a tea came from, and even roughly how old it is, just by smelling and tasting it.
How he got into it is a funny story. We both studied chemistry, and most of our classmates went into pharmaceutical companies or teaching. Wei's grandparents had a small tea garden, and he spent every summer there as a child. In our final year, he did a research project on the chemistry of tea fermentation, and one of the companies that supplied samples offered him a trainee position. His parents were horrified at first, because they expected him to work in a laboratory.
I think he chose it for a few reasons. Partly it's family; it connects him to his grandparents' world. Partly it's personality: he's always been very sensitive to smells and flavours, and he finds labs boring. But I think the main reason is that he wanted a job where science meets real life. He still uses chemistry every day, just in a field you wouldn't expect. Whenever I'm bored at my desk, I remember that he spends his mornings drinking tea on a mountain, and I'm slightly jealous.