I was sitting at my desk today, drifting off (I have a
In contemplating this question before, I had always thought of myself as indecisive, as someone who had a lot of trouble deciding what it was she wanted to be when she grew up. As a small child, I really wanted to be a pediatrician. I love kids, and I love problem solving. Over time, though, I realized that I just didn't love science, and I definitely didn't love it enough to want to subject myself to medical school. I spent a number of years equally certain that I wanted to be a teacher, ideally a teacher of small children. This turned into a dream of one day working at and eventually owning/running a preschool. I attended a Montessori-style preschool myself and really loved it; I imagined myself running a similar place. In pursuit of this dream, I volunteered as a classroom aide in a local school and taught Sunday School at my church for the nursery school kids. I also ran the nursery at church for a while. I'm not sure what happened to this dream, but a couple of years after my parents' divorce (around the time I really started processing it), I stopped really giving a lot of thought to what I wanted to do with my life.
I honestly don't recall giving a single thought throughout the latter half of high school to what I wanted to do after college. I wrote a lot and I read a lot. Much of my reading and writing focused on issues facing adolescent girls, which makes sense since I was one. At my ten year high school reunion, a number of people commented on being shocked that I hadn't become a writer (including a few teachers), and I felt a burning shame at how little I had written in the ten years since graduation. But I never really imagined that I would write for a living. To be fair, I never really imagined that I would have any particular profession; in fact, I never really imagined my future at all (which seems odd now, given my current tendencies).
As for my lack of ability to imagine my own future, nothing really changed in college. I took a wide array of courses in a wide variety of departments -- my first year alone, I took courses in geology, anthropology, women's studies, government, literature, psychology, religion, and writing. For no reason that I can think of now, I decided to study psychology, and ended up focusing on developmental psychology. I periodically imagined myself going to graduate school in psych and become a child psychologist or a researcher in that area. But my thesis (on body image issues in children) took a lot out of me, so I decided to work for a few years first.
I looked for jobs in consulting because it was the easiest thing and I had become
We are in hiring season right now to bring in the next crop of new
1 comment:
As a fellow "off the tracker", I hear you on this. And I think that volunteering is a great idea!
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