What I Wanted to be When I Grew Up

Sometimes, I think I was born in the wrong generation.

I had many ideas about what I wanted to be someday when I was a kid. I loved cop shows, so thought I might want to do that. But I'm a coward and I was on the short side. Still am. I thoght about being a teacher, but that lost its appeal after a while. It was too clearly a woman's job. And I never thought about being a librarian, despite creating my own little library when I loaned books to friends, complete with due date cards.

I got through high school with no career goal in mind. I liked the class I took during my senior year of high school (Computer Math), but it was difficult to work with that kind of programming and the results were boring math equations. ho hum.

In college, I floundered for a couple of years, until I took Introduction to Psych. I enjoyed it and the other psych classes I took, so declared myself a psych major, despite not having a clue what I'd do with a BA in psych (with the even more useful philosophy minor). The professor of my Experimental Psychology class took me under her wing and I named her my mentor. And when I graduated, I still had no idea what I wanted to do with my life.

My real love was art, but the college art class I took was just weird, and I had no idea what you could do with art as a career. I didn't want to practice psych and the amount of schooling I still needed to be a psych professor was daunting. I was tired of school. So after 15 credits towards my Masters, I quit.

I worked as a typist at a couple of places and decided that books were a real love, which meant publishing (requiring a college degree for entry level jobs) and librarianship (requiring an MS). With my GREs running out, I figured I'd get the library degree, then decide. I was still making it up as I went along.

One year later, I had a MS in hand and interviewed with a recruiter, leading to a job indexing at Readers' Guide to Periodical Literature. Two years later, the local library systems were hiring again and I became a public librarian. I fell into this career and haven't regretted it.

But something has happened in the last few years. I got into the web in a big way. Computers mean something new now. I don't need to know programming to make them work. So, along with my goal of being a professional novelist one of these days, I'm happily doing a website, working on a second to sell crafts (mine and a friend's, as I get back to my early love of art), and blogging.

And it hit me recently. If I were in college now, I'd know, for the first time in my life, exactly what I would want to do. Web design.

I'm lucky. In my job, I get to work on our website (and my bosses were worried no one would keep up with it if we were given edit control), including our newly launched forums (message boards), and soon to come, our very own blog, the first by one of our branch libraries. I am so jazzed. Finally, I'm going to be doing for work, where I get paid, something I do at home for fun.

Can there be anything better than that? (picture big smiley face here)