'like a Good Second Marriage"

"How can I extricate myself from my career?" said the letter sent to Columbia University's School of General Studies. The writer did not hate his job. It was just that he felt that he had "slipped unheedingly" into his career and in middle age suspected that some other profession would mean more to him. His letter, and about 3,000 others like it, are the reason for Columbia's "New Careers" program to educate successful people for diametrically different jobs. Less systematically, other universities are also rechanneling talent.

The switchers mostly feel that their work has become a bore, a trap or a disillusionment. A 40-year-old company president wrote Columbia that he felt "wasted in working for material gain only." A department head in a large engineering firm complained that his job entailed "a continuous round of panics with little ultimate purpose or meaning." "My job was a boring, stale thing to me," said Mrs. Carolyn Sadow, one of 14 people who have been through the New Careers program.

"I Cried." At 50, Mrs. Sadow had put in 25 years in the frenetic field of Manhattan fashion advertising to become a copy supervisor with a two-window corner office, a comfortable $13,000 salary, and a sense of frustration. "The superficial little plays on words, the tired old turns of phrase that might seem something new to a little girl fresh out of Smith or Vassar--they were old hat to me." Mrs. Sadow quit to seek a master's degree in library service at Columbia, where at first she found studies so difficult that she "went home and cried every day." She stuck it out, today has a $6,250 job on the reference desk of the main New York Public Library, where she fields queries from Bryant Park bums and world-renowned scholars. Her life, she says, has never held such "gaiety, zest and ebullience--it's like a good second marriage."

A West Coast switcher is Maxwell Wihnyk, who in 1947 bought a small weekly in the desert community of Beaumont, Calif., and built it into a profitable chain of seven papers. "One morning in 1961," he recalls, "I woke up and realized that the papers I owned weren't providing me with satisfaction." Wihnyk was fascinated by courtrooms, decided that he had "seen hundreds of lawyers who weren't doing as good a job as I thought I could do." So, at 48, he sold his papers, joined his daughter as a student at U.C.L.A. Now an attorney, Wihnyk finds law "totally rewarding," believes that "I'm doing good for myself and for those who put their problems in my hands."

Beyond Chair Legs. Gilbert Daniels, 38, national sales manager for a computer firm, found himself "traveling 15,000 miles a month between California and the East Coast," which took him away from his family and his plant collection. He lived off his stock dividends while earning a doctorate in botany at U.C.L.A., figures he will make less as a botanist "than I paid last year in income taxes." But, he says, "I will be earning a living while I indulge my interests--my two lives will be one again."

At 60, Herbert Summers turned from his career in mechanical and civil engineering to learn scuba diving, earn a master's in oceanographic geology at Southern Cal, land a job to study sediment movements on the ocean floor. Mrs. Sylvia P. Pauley earned $30,000 a year as an interior decorator in Manhattan for such clients as Charles of the Ritz, decided she wanted to be interested in "something more vital than chair legs." At 46, she enrolled at Columbia, got a B.S. in sociology, then an M.A. in educational administration. Today she makes $10,000 helping Job Corps graduates find jobs in eight Eastern states.

Often switching careers is a "magnificent success," says U.C.L.A. Education Placement Director Claude Fossett, and occasionally "men fall flat on their faces." The reasons for change, although obviously sometimes altruistic, sometimes self-seeking and almost always highly personal, are not well understood. Perhaps eventually the Columbia project, financed by a $100,000 Ford Foundation grant, will illuminate the motivations and prospects of those who are hopelessly dissatisfied with life at midcareer.

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