This 34-year-old supersized her salary with her third career

By Jennifer Weiss

This 34-year-old supersized her salary after two career changes

Megan Lewis-Taylor has already had three careers by her mid-30s.

After high school, she entered college at an aeronautical university on an Army ROTC scholarship. But it wasn't the right fit or the right time, so she put her passion for aerospace and aviation on hold and dropped out.

Instead, she went to work on the water, enlisting in the U.S. Coast Guard. She served on a search-and-rescue team and later was a first responder to crises like the Boston Marathon bombing and Hurricane Sandy.

After five years on active duty, she wanted a change. She considered returning to college, but instead got a job in policing, working for the New Hampshire Liquor Commission.

She spent two years there. Then she decided she was ready to finally go back to college, studying mechanical engineering at Southern New Hampshire University.

She recalled not getting much support. "When you leave a job and you make this change, it's like you're going against the grain of what people want, and so they just don't understand why," she said.

With funding from the GI Bill, which included health insurance, she could get by after her income dropped to zero. She thought she could help people on a larger scale as an engineer.

Through a company board member she met in college, she got an internship at Collins Aerospace, a technology company and supplier of defense products. She's now a principal engineer rotating through different roles in a leadership program there, and she volunteers on projects abroad through Engineers Without Borders.

Changing careers has not only brought Lewis-Taylor three interesting chapters of her life so far, it also supersized her salary. Even as an engineering intern, her salary started out at more than the military and policing jobs. She said she's in the middle of the pay range for her field, which is between $96,000 and $196,000.

She's also a rare woman in the field; just 10 percent of mechanical engineers and 14 percent of aerospace engineers are women, according to U.S. Census Bureau data compiled by the Society for Women Engineers.

Lewis-Taylor is glad she hit pause to focus on where she ultimately wanted to be.

"When you're in it, it's grinding," she said. "But when you're out of it, I can't even remember how hard that was, or how much I cried, or how much I had to sacrifice because my life is so different now."

Watch Lewis-Taylor in our series Career Changers, which follows people who take chances to choose different paths in their professional lives.

Brian Quist contributed to this story

-Jennifer Weiss

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09-24-24 1117ET

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