Vocation according to Webster: the work in which a person is regularly employed; occupation
Vocation according to Lilly: things I've done to earn money which I try to make fulfilling; "my so called career".

Here's my telling of My Career (I took my resume offline -- too many recruiters):

Education and Career Interests:
I attended Wellesley College where I double majored in Computer Science and Cognitive Science. My focus has been on human-computer interaction so although I've had all sorts of coding experience, my preference is to develop user interfaces.

Jobs I've had:

During high school I worked in a jewelry store. I did accounting, polishing, dusting, and selling. I learned that I can keep a checkbook balanced without much difficulty and I learned to say with great sincerity "that piece would go beautifully with anything, from denim to silk".

I drove the campus shuttle at college. It was a great way to make some spending money and feel useful without distracting my brain from studying.

(OK, here's where the career building stuff starts coming in)

One semester in college I worked as an intern in the I.S. department of WHDH TV, the Boston CBS affiliate. I developed a database for their software library (anyone else remember askSam?) and did various I.S. support tasks.

For two summers I worked at Lotus Development Corporation in Cambridge. The first time I did technical support. The second time I worked in the technical marketing department and wrote my first C program. I was able to leverage my Lotus 1-2-3 knowledge into tutoring jobs where I taught the wonders of spreadsheets to Wellesley students who wanted to go into the world of finance (there were a lot of them). Yes, the world was quite different before Excel caught on.

Fresh out of college during a very dry spell in the tech industry (hard to believe these days), I moved to Silicon Valley and worked at GRiD on PenRight! a pen computing SDK. Yes, I hold Jeff Hawkins, the father of the Palm Pilot, personally responsible for transplanting an unsuspecting New Englander into a climate that you never want to leave, no matter how much traffic you have to plow through each day.

After GRiD I went to Brio Technology which is where I had my true grounding in software development. We did object oriented programming in C. Lots o' structs. I spent 3 years there. It's much bigger now than it was then! I was a Mac user there, which is an experience I can barely relate to nowadays (though I do curse the Windows UI regularly).

I left Brio to join up with Milktruck, a true startup (to which my friends said "uh, weren't you already working at a startup?"), two guys in a condo. We developed an offline web browsing utility and were purchased by Traveling Software.

Purple Moon was my next stop where I fed my desire to make technology more accessible for girls. But the business realities came down pretty harsh on that vision and I had to move on.

Next up was SuccessFactors.com (formerly Austin-Hayne) where we created intranet human resources applications. You may have heard of Employee Appraiser, which is the standalone product that helps managers write performance reviews. I confronted the horrors of creating a usable interface that works across browsers and doesn't take eons to download. It's the holy grail of a usable web application. No, it's not the same as creating a web site. Some people (like askTog) are realizing that. I was also the engineering lead for our infrastructure project, which means I got to tell certain engineers to shut up during meetings :-).

Looking for a place where I could still create user interfaces in an object-oriented language, I went to PlaceWare where they were using Java for web conferencing software. After a couple of years, we were acquired by Microsoft Corporation. I moved with several co-workers up to Redmond and am now a Program Manager there.