Tie between judge or crossing guard. Turns out I just love a good Halloween costume. I’ve worked in higher ed my entire career.

I wanted to be an astronaut, a common dream for a kid. Later I wanted to be a biologist. Of course as you can see, I’m definitely not an astronaut nor a biologist lmao

pilot

Im afraid of heights

Chef or Pilot! At one point a Vicar which is hilarious to me now.

Got “stuck with” being a psychotherapist, which turns out I absolutely love and can’t imagine doing anything else with my life now.

Astronaut. Space was my first love. At least up until about first/second grade (age 6-7).

Eventually, I became more interested in computers. My dad is a programmer in an IT capacity and he used to bring home parts from mainframes or servers. I was fascinated with these components. He would also write little QBasic programs for me that did cool graphical stuff, like colored bubbles floating on screen or colored “laser lines.” He’d bring me to his office to see the “computer room,” which was just like an entire floor of mainframes and servers and tape machines. I was amazed and thought I wanted to be programmer like him.

Around my preteen/teen yrs, I taught myself HTML/CSS and started making my own websites. By high school, I was taking programming classes.

I went to college for CS, but I also got a job as a part time website manager and email designer. Though I also became that guy who knew how to fix my coworkers issues with their computers. For various reasons, I never finished my CS degree, instead just opting for a 2yr degree.

Today, I’m solidly in the IT realm. Mainly in end user support, but I also do some more sysadmin-y stuff with the network and servers and even procurement. Still do some light web and email stuff, but it’s usually more on the technical side these days. Been just over 18yrs since I first got the parttime gig. I’m now on my second stint with this group and I’m the IT Manager. In a department of one!

You can change careers in your 40s/50s if you want.

It’s likely easier to get into the field you want once you’re established, have resources and work experience even if it’s not relevant.

So don’t freak out haha

But personally when I was 11 we got a PC. My parents put it in my room. Which tbh irritated me at the time.

But I got super into it and started looking around the program files folder and at all the weird files in there.

I decided my dream was to make an application that needed those weird files. Which I did about a year later haha

But I fell in love with programming. I chose all my secondary school and college classes so I could get into university for it.

I actually did Games Technology but realised I didn’t enjoy that as much as general programming.

So I was lucky that i had the computer in my room and found something I was good at when I was young. And even luckier that it pays well.

Your future isn’t generally decided by a couple big decisions but 100s of small ones.

If you’re worried just start trying different things and you’ll likely find something you enjoy and/or have a talent for.

I liked toys as a kid so I wanted to be a toy maker. I really didn’t know what my options were tbh.

I wanted to be an architect but ended up as a software engineer. I fell in love with programming in high school and the rest is history. It worked out pretty well for me.

Wanted to be an architect, up until I was about 11 or 12. Then I wanted to be a Graphic Designer, which I now am!

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I always wanted to be a train engineer, but being colorblind makes that impossible

A cashier because people throw money at me all day. Also a scientist because science is cool. Now I spent 5+ years studying my favourite sciences only to realise the job I’ve been studying for is a cashier… Yeah I should probably go for a PhD

When I was a little kid people would ask me what I wanted to be when I grew up, I simply answered “Happy”.

As I got older I learned what I enjoyed doing and I had some ideas.

First I wanted to be teacher, then I wanted to be an engineer, then I wanted to be a teacher again, then I became homeless so I had only the dream of getting enough of a job to get a roof over my head.

Then life got harder once I left highschool and basically all the support I was getting went away. I was homeless and I had a job that I was dumping all of my money into going to school to try and make it work. I really wanted to be a teacher.

Then some stuff happened causing life to get even harder and I dropped out. What little support I had went away.

I still had dreams of being a teacher as soon as I could get my life together.

Then my life fell apart further.

And further.

Eventually I got my life together enough to try again. But then life got hard again and I had to make a call. Risk homelessness again or drop out again.

I drive a forklift now… I have for nearly a decade and I’ll probably drive it for a long long time more.

Sometimes I think about becoming a teacher, but finances being what they are nowadays I could never afford the schooling and rent. And with what teacher’s salaries are if I took loans I’d never be able to pay them back.

The prompt for this post is missing a fundamental bit of context for each response:

1. What class were you born in to?
2. How active was your parent(s) involvement in your college/career prep/pursuit?
3. Did you struggle to pay for education and have to work through school or did you get to focus solely on learning and social networking?

I never had an easy time imagining a future for myself and I never had realistic goals. When I was a kid I wanted to be a Ghostbuster, then a power ranger. Then I think I disassociated for a long time, briefly got the idea to be a programmer in college, but that didn’t work out since I was no good at it. Then I randomly had the idea to study genetics, which also didn’t work out. I changed majors eight times in college.

Won’t say what I do now so I don’t get doxxed, but it’s not exciting and it’s a dead end job. I still don’t know what I want, but maybe that’s a good thing. I make music though so that’s kind of neat.