My sister wanted to build rockets and fly in them. I have no idea when she fell in love with aviation, but she’s only three years older than I am and I literally don’t remember her not being fascinated by it, or even expressing interest in any other possible career. While cleaning the attic a few years ago, my parents found it very easy to sort out my childhood books/movies/art projects/etc from my sister’s: if it was about airplanes or rockets, it was hers, and all the other stuff was mine. She was borderline obsessive…and never changed her mind about it. Took two years of physics in high school, interned with NASA, went to college, learned how to fly, majored in astronautical engineering, interned with NASA again, earned a master’s degree in astronautical engineering, worked building rockets for the government briefly, and is currently nearing the end of her training as a flight test engineer. So…yeah, her (only) childhood fascination has turned into a career.
Apparently, she used up all the career focus our household had to offer, because I was one of those kids who wanted to be an artist and a writer and a firefighter and a veterinarian and a ninja and a biologist and a doctor and a truck driver (what?) and so on. I still don’t know what I want to be when I grow up.
ETA: trupa - it seems to be an aviation thing. Some kids latch on to it and, well, that’s that.
aruvqan, sorry – I hope I didn’t overstep – it’s just that it seemed from your post that your plan (er, well, not plan so much as “idea” but you know what I mean) was to work on the conservation side. Carry on!
A snapshot of me as a kid would be a little girl on the floor drawing like crazy while listening to an array of 45’s on the shiny new Mickey Mouse record player. The room would be full of odd pets and plants, rocks, seeds, pods, shells, and other nature collections.
All those interests manifested in an odd track; the drawing/painting was curtailed into music photography (and associated support of musicians) for two decades, and now I make my living in horticulture, which was always on the backburner rise. Worked in wildlife rehab full time, and still have a flashing light on my house for strays and odd critters. That snapshot pretty much stands as what I’ve become.
There are pictures of me as a six year old giving herb leaves to my friends for them to smell and taste. Biology was my favourite subject in high school, I joined a nature study group as a teenager, and before I got sucked into my current environmetal policy desk job I worked for six years as a botanist and ecologist.
It lapsed somewhere around 11, but when I was in high school a counselor suggested I look into what I was interested in and got me a chance to shadow a paleontologist. I found I was still fascinated and started taking more courses towards that (this was after I’d dropped out and went back) and when I graduated I went to apply…
Well hell, they changed the requirements on me (from biology and another science to chemistry and another… I had biology and physics as physics was what I’d taken first). So I went back to take chem and was kicking ass (90% average!) before I got pregnant and things changed. Single mom + an Honors university program? Not going to work. So I ended up taking Accounting, and now I work in Logistics.
Though the dino fascination is still there. I’m going to a lecture by Dr Philip Curie next month at the zoo, just because. Maybe once my son is grown I can go back, hell my family does it all the time.
See the last three letters in my username. Childhood fascination? Check. The one thread connecting my on-again, off-again professional life ever since? Check. Really making it a lifelong, consistently-paid career? Jury’s still out on that one, but we’ll know the answer by this time next year.
Not at all =) I think when I said that on a dig site instead of getting muddy playing in the dirt [i am in a wheelchair most of the time, so that isn’t really possible =)] I would be valuable as one of the people that lurks on the sidelines cleaning up and conserving and packing for shipment whatever turns up when people do grub around in the dirt =)
I know what I am physically able to do =) and where my interests are. I know that a certain amount of dig time is pretty much required, so I will do what I need to for getting the degree. What I am interested in is working with the items discovered, and the structures once they are cleaned up not the actual grubbing around in the dirt. [and oddly enough, the people that actually do a majority of the dirt grubbing are now frequently ‘paying guests’ doing the educational tour, students getting experience and natives being paid to work. The higher in rank, the less grubbing one does and the more supervisory work you do.] I also like writing - I used to be very active in the SCA, and did a lot of research, and wrote a lot of articles for various SCA publications. I would like to get back into research and writing but getting published requires a degree to be taken seriously and to get access to research materials/museum collections/archeological sites like Pompeii [just as an example.]
In first grade, we were given weekly spelling tests every Monday. If we spelled everything correctly, for the rest of the week during spelling we could pretty much relax. Everyone else had to work on spelling a bit each day and re-take the test on Friday. After every Monday test, I’d come home full of new ammo to test my three-year-old sister with. Not maliciously - I just genuinely loved going to school every day and couldn’t understand why a three-year-old didn’t appreciate being sat down and being given the free knowledge that came with all my adventures in the classroom, including a spelling test, every week.
I had some sort of world encyclopedia computer game that I played constantly and would run out and tell my parents or friends whenever I learned something new. I also loved nearly every teacher I ever had, and can still remember every single one of their names (including the ones from preschool, and the ones who just taught me one subject and weren’t my ‘home’ teacher).
I was also always putting on some sort of ‘play’ or concert with my cousins and friends, or hamming it up for the video camera, or in piano lessons, or joining every choir that would have me. I gave up lots of my weeknights and weekends as a middle and high schooler to prepare for and act in dramas at church, as well as lead worship in the kids’ services. During VBS, I sang onstage every opening and closing with the adults, then rushed off stage to go teach a group of kids in between.
My days of church attendance are long gone, but my love of music, fact collecting, and sharing what I’ve learned are all alive and well.
Future elementary music educator here, and I couldn’t be happier about it.
I was a little boy in the 1980’s, when the space shuttle was new and cool and my home country, Canada, got to show off the robotic arm we had provided for it, and the new team of astronauts who would travel to space in it. I was fascinated will all things space – astronautics, astronomy, and science fiction. I read every book on it I could find, gazed up at the stars through my window, and ran around in the forest pretending I was exploring new worlds like Captain Kirk.
When I was about 8, my parents gave me a plastic model kit of the space shuttle Discovery, which my father helped me assemble and paint. It came with all the details – landing gear, decals, experiments for the payload bay, and of course, the Canadarm. I didn’t put the arm on the model, though. It wasn’t articulated, and it would have been flimsy and fragile and would have prevented the articulated payload bay doors from closing. But the model also came with an optional module to put in the payload bay – the pressurized Spacelab science laboratory module which the European Space Agency provided for the shuttle program. I painted that up and installed it in my model, and the model hung from the ceiling of my bedroom for years.
Fast forward fifteen years or so, and I’m graduating from university with a degree in mechanical engineering. And I don’t know what I want to do with the rest of my life. But deciding that my whole life’s path is at stake, I decide to take some time to indulge in dreaming big, and I start applying for space jobs. The Canadian Space Agency is in the middle of reorganization and financial limitations, and isn’t hiring. NASA has tightened the rules, and it’s now nearly impossible to get on with them unless you’re a US citizen. But then I remember the ESA logo on my space shuttle model, still hanging in my old bedroom, and on a lark, check the Agency’s website. Not only are there dozens of jobs available, but the HR page has a note at the bottom that says:
The story is long and hilarious, but in short, I couldn’t get a space job in Canada, so I went and got one at the European Space Agency. I was working on experiments for the International Space Station – and not for the Canadian contribution to the facility (Canadarm2), but for the European Columbus laboratory, which was the successor to the Spacelab module I’d installed in my model instead of the Canadarm. My supervisor at ESA had himself worked on the Spacelab experiment facilities for fluid science*, and I was working on the successor facility, the Fluid Science Laboratory for the ISS.
I’ve since come back to Canada, though, and am wrapping up a master’s degree in Space Science. I’m going to do my best to keep working in this field.
Those being the Bubble, Drop, and Particle Unit (BDPU) and Critical Point Facility (CPF).
Have you ever spent much time out here? The UCLA campus and the neighborhoods around it are quite lovely. Sure, it’s not the cheapest place to live, but it’s relatively safe and clean for a big-city neighborhood.
When I was a kid - really young, 7 or 8, The Paper Chase was on TV. I wanted to be a lawyer. I wanted to study in a big library with lots of lawbooks. I used to play at being a judge or a lawyer (as best I had a vauge understanding of it).
So I got an English degree. I took some law classes, but I didn’t think I could be a lawyer, I didn’t think I was smart enough. But I really wanted to be one, and I used to think what if…
When I was a kid, from a very young age, I was fascinated with movies, special effects, and stop animation. I commandeered my dad’s old 8mm film camera to make my own stop animations.
Cool. I had no interest in commercial aircraft when I was young, BUT I was fascinated with the concept of flying and military aircraft both old and modern. I had a cupboard in my bedroom made up into a fighter cockpit and I’d sit in there when I was 8 - 9 and make aeroplane noises. I made model aeroplanes, paper darts, flew kites, regularly rode a bicycle 30kms to visit an airforce base, joined the air cadets, got a gliding scholarship, and watched Top GUn seven times in the movie theater and at least another 20 times on video. Now flying is my job, though I still have no great interest in commercial aircraft other than as a source of income.
This was also true of me and for a long, long time in my childhood and adolescence, I wanted badly to make videogames when I grew up. I did go on to get a degree in computer science, with the videogame thing surely playing a major role in my initial interest in programming and so forth (and, in fact, my first exposure to Haskell was sparked by a reply Tim Sweeney gave to an e-mail from my 10th grade self asking the best way to break into the videogame business), but I was already fairly disabused of the glamor of the idea of working in that industry by the time I started college and eventually, alas, apparently lost most of my interest in even working on such things as a hobby. (Of course, these days, I hardly even play videogames, so… that’s that, as well)
Too crowded, and I detest the way it takes forever to drive anywhere because of the road system. Being there for more than the weekends I have visited is about as appealing as root canal without drugs. It has always reminded me of living in one of those ant colonies you used to see back in the 60s and 70s in elementary school classrooms. I do understand the air quality has improved from the 70s and 80s. I went through a weekend of temperature inversion and ended up with bronchitis from that visit. Hopefully it is way better…though I bet it is even more crowded, and the roads are way more packed and slow.
[I was in LA about 4-5 days a month on business from 79-80 and 81-84 for the company I was working for. ]
A lot of my early fascination with computers was around games. Of course, in the 1970s, it’s not like the games were the way they are now, but in a way that played into my fascination - they were accessible, I could actually program my own game that was almost as good as anything on the market.
My first experience with programming was typing in code from Compute! Magazine (I’m sure I’m not the only one…) so I could play more games than just the few my parents bought me with my Vic 20. Later on, I took after-school lessons on programming.
I was pretty obsessed, but by the time I graduated from high school I’d decided I didn’t want to do anything with computers for a living. Instead, I went to school more with an eye towards my archeology interest - ended up with a major in Greek & Latin. Even went and did independent research in Greece… on “Computing in Greece.” Put myself through school working in various computer-related jobs.
And here I am, 40 years old, still working in computers, and trying to figure out what I REALLY want to do when I grow up.
I love being an EE.
I’m going to do my best to keep working in this field.