Okay, so I didn’t really say that when I was a kid. But I did come close. I did know that I wanted to be a lawyer and I wanted to work in international matters. And it was clearly fated. My great-grandmother, who lived in Greenville, SC told everyone that I talked like a Philadelphia lawyer. And here I am, a Philadelphia lawyer (lesson learned, listen to your elders).
In honor of Take Your Sons and Daughters to Work Day on April 24, the Business Channel is asking our readers to think about how our experiences as children influence our career choices. From April 1 to April 20, I am asking you to post a comment about this idea of what you want to be when you grow up… At the end of the month, you may be entered to win a gift card to Barnes and Noble for $25.
There are no fancy requirements. More or less, we just want your thoughts on career decisions and how those are influenced. Consider:
What did you want to be when you were little?
What do you still plan on doing now? It’s never too late to start a new career – just think, Colonel Sanders didn’t start KFC until he was 66, after retirement age.
What do your kids want to do?
Why are you doing what you’re doing now?
We’re not looking for tomes. Just your brief thoughts and experiences. Post away!
And yeah, there are some rules. There are always rules. Here they are:
1, Comments must be posted between 12:01 am EST on April 1 and 11:59pm EST on April 20.
2, You must include your full name and your email address in the correct field with your comment. We won’t publish your email address but we do need contact information for the winning entry. We respect your privacy, and we will not send you anything unrelated to your entry in this contest.
3, You can enter the contest as many times as you’d like, as long as each comment is unique.
4, By entering the contest, you agree that b5media may post any part or all of your comment, including your name, as a part of the contest announcements or promotions, with the exception of your email address.
5, By entering the contest, you agree that all works submitted on your behalf are original and belong to you or you declare that you have the right to submit those works. You may not submit ideas that are not your own or that you do not have permission to submit.
6, All decisions related to finalists are in the sole discretion of the judge and are final.
When I was a kid, I wanted to be an astronaut.
When I was a teenager, I wanted to be a math Ph.D. working for Microsoft. I had the opportunity to be one of the first 600 MS employees. My high school counselor told me that MS would just turn me into a technician and I didn’t want that. (First 3500 MS employees are all worth tens of millions of dollars.)
Now, I am a technician making engineers pay. THANKS! Note to my kids: Take career advice from successful people and except no substitutes.
Now, I want to be a horror/romance genre novelist and never comment on politics again. Politics wears me out.
Had a power outage. Please correct my link. Cool blog, btw. It is I am sure helpful to lots of folks.
when i was young, i wanted to be an archaeologist. so, when i grew up the first time, i got an anthropology degree and spent 6 years doing cultural resources management archaeology all over the eastern U.S.
eventually i realized that i’d never be able to raise a family on the piddling salary that work afforded and decided to go to law school. for a while, i wanted to be a tax attorney, and i still do. alas, i’m not also a CPA, and am seriously hindered in accomplishing that goal.
now that i’m only a few weeks away from graduation, culinary school’s looking pretty good 🙂
My son is 7-years-old and from the time he was three, he has loved dinosaurs and wants to be a paleontologist when he grows up. While most kids his age are reading Captain Underpants books and watching SpongeBob SquarePants, my son constantly checks out books and DVD’s (non-fiction only) about dinosaurs. Most children change their minds many times about what they want to be when they grow-up, but this has been going on for so long, I am anxious to see if he actually does it!
When I was young I wanted to be a teacher. My first internship cured me of that – I loved the kids, but the veteran teachers I worked with weren’t the people I wanted to be in fifteen years. I reconsidered, completed my degree in political science, and promptly started being a full time parent and homeschooler.
My children are grown now – the youngest started college this past fall. I returned to school when my older daughter began college. This time I took a degree in accounting (I sit for the CPA exam in May). Strangely accounting would never have been something I considered – probably because my mother was in the field, and something rebellious in me said, “no way”.
My children grew up wanting variously to be a window, a statue, a chef, a journalist and an activist. Today my older daughter is, in fact, a chef. The younger is studying political science and very much an activist on her campus. I’ll be in interested in seeing where they journey over the lifetimes of their careers.