I decided very early in life that I wanted to work in radio and/or TV broadcasting, and that’s what I did. No one in my family were ever in any form of show biz. My parents probably thought being a disc jockey was a frivolous occupation, but they were relieved I was doing something that at least interested me. Frankly, I didn’t have any interest or inclination for anything else.
I knew one kid in elementary school whose grandfather was a doctor, his father was a doctor, his mother was a nurse, his older brother was a doctor, and he was expected to become a doctor too, which he did. He’s the only person I ever knew who really went into the family business like that. He might have been better off if he’d not succumbed to the pressure and done something else. Patient complaints caused him to lose his license to practice, his home, his family, and later, his life.
Zero percent. My mother was an engineer, like my grandfather before her, and I was a writer. I wrote all kinds of things but loved nothing more than fiction. My Mom did not understand what strange alien child she had created.
To my Mom’s credit, one thing she did really well, is allowed me to pursue my interests regardless of whether they matched hers.
My grandmother was an English teacher and I very nearly followed in her footsteps, in fact that was the plan going into college, but I found the English department lacking at my college. Maybe I just didn’t have the right classes. And I was studying Spanish so I entertained being a professor of Spanish literature for a while. It was all the joy of English literature with the added difficulty of a second language.
When I graduated it was either Spanish professor or social worker. I ended up choosing social work. I’m embarrassed to admit this, but my deciding factor was not having to take the GRE.
I’m a grants manager. It’s notable that I’m regarded as highly analytical by my co-workers, not what you would expect from a creative type but I love the administration and strategic planning as much as the writing.
And of course now I’m getting it back tenfold. My son is some kind of math genius. I don’t think he likes math in the traditional sense, either, he seems way more interested in theoretical math and finding its absolute limits. He’s also obsessed with space. Right now his passion is universe size comparison videos on YouTube. My current best guess is he’s going to want to be a theoretical physicist.
We are supporting him the best we can but I don’t have the knowledge base to answer a lot of his questions.
None whatsoever for me. Natural father was a radio/TV station engineer, as well as avionics technician, stepfather was HVAC, mother was a bookkeeper for many years.
I’ve been 35 years in the steel fabrication industry, first working on the floor of the shop, then on to steel detailing, purchasing, estimating, and project management. Wish I’d stayed with a union shop, could be retired now
Somewhat. My dad was a flying instructor in WW II and later a transport pilot overseas at the end.
I’ve always loved airplanes but, because of supply and demand, ended up a naval officer, so maybe inspired by my dad. Also, there was also this sort of “ambient assumption” that I would go to university, which I did, and got a BA in English.
My extended family, as far as the military was concerned, was all RCAF. I might be the first naval person in my family.
My mother was a HS dropout and SAHM. My father may have finished HS. He never said so and my mother did make that claim, but she was prone to, uh, exaggerate. At any rate he worked in a factory, making diamond dental drills. He helped develop the process in 1939 when it became clear that the German imports were about to disappear. So he was something more than a skilled worker. At any rate, none of this had any influence on my career. I worked my way through college in a lab that convinced me that my chosen career as a chemist was wrong. I discovered abstract math and that was my career. My parents never understood what I actually did. My father had a friend who imagined me sitting in a room all day adding enormous columns of numbers. But nothing like math in my ancestry.
My mother was a teacher, as am I, but we’re in very different areas. She taught second and third graders, while I teach high school math. Some parts are common to any grade level, though.
I may need to consult with you at a certain point!
Numbers aren’t just useful to my son, he prizes them for their aesthetic value and their possibility. This kid sleeps with three different calculators. At first he was really drawn to square numbers and cube numbers, and building squares and cubes. Then he learned about powers of ten, which led to him memorizing large numbers and his love affair with Googol and Googolplex. Right now I have zeroes all over my house, or at least objects he has decided look enough like zeros to be used as placeholders, because he wants to represent numbers as large as humanly possible. He came home today rambling about Omega, Infinity and Absolute Infinity. He gets this stuff from YouTube. No idea whether he truly grasps those concepts but he probably has a better idea than I do. But more importantly to me, he wants to understand them. He wants to understand how it all fits together.
Right now we are the arbiters of knowledge to my son. But at a certain point, he’s going to realize how feeble- minded we are. And then I don’t know what to do.
I take after my grandmother in coaching adults with developmental disabilities. She grew up on a farm where her two cousins had developmental disabilities and labored on the farm. I got to meet them decades afterwards and was inspired in observing how they had learned in light of their disabilities. My grandma of course did this as an avocation before our culture considered a ‘job coach’ as a paid job.
Well, my father was a sewage treatment plant operator, so mostly no. The family mission statement was that Dad had been the first person in his family to graduate high school and we were going to be the first to go to college - which we did.
Mom’s dad was a double union man, a carpenter and a welder. He was always the guy who looked over the job and either improved the design or improved the process. So I heard about instances of that.
I ended up in engineering because everything seemed interesting and it was hard to choose a major. So when I qualified for what was basically a scholarship that only covered engineering, engineering it was.
Civil engineering was what I ended up with by taking classes and deciding, nope, not electrical, and so on. Which is kind of what civil engineering is. Because of my familiarity with sewage treatment, I chose an environmental emphasis. I actually got to use it, sort of, for one project.
Now I’m working in the Traffic Engineering Division of our local Public Works Department.
My devout Catholic mother’s four younger sisters all became nuns (in the same order) and one of her brothers became a religious brother. All five of them were also teachers.
Wow, that’s a lot of nuns (and a priest)! Did your mother consider becoming a nun, too?
I thought about becoming a nun when I was a kid…for about 15 minutes. I forgot my lunch and was sent to the convent to ask for one.The cook was nice, and the lunch was delicious: a corned beef sandwich, chips, and a Reese’s peanut butter cup. If wearing a habit was going to get me that well-fed, I was ready to sign up. Also, I was fascinated by the nuns’ habits.
My paternal grandfather was a machinist, and he really wanted my dad to go to college.
My dad graduated with bachelor’s of science in mechanical engineering and went on to get his professional engineer license.
I got the BSME, but never did the building part. I end up in technical writing and information architecture. A few years back I was helping my parents clean out the closet underneath the stairs and found a book about technical writing. It was my mom’s, somehow related to her studies as a legal assistant.
So my career does not match either of my parents. But it is heavily influenced by them.
Leaving aside the fact that there is essentially no such thing as a career anymore, no, I did not choose my Parents’ fields. They worked in a hospital-adjacent jobs. It was Nursing, but for Psych and disabilities.
Whereas I wanted to be in something arty and creative. I dabbled in that but never really found my feet anywhere, and now I have a drone job in a warehouse because that’s all there is these days.
I grew up in a rural area amongst farms and fishing boats, and kids following their parents’ footsteps was quite common, but my generation seemed to have restless feet and very few of my contemporaries went through with that path.
My father was a surety underwriter for construction projects. My mother was a SAHM, who always wished she could have gone to university. Long story short, I had to go to university, get a degree, and then get a nice, comfy, shirt-and-tie, Monday to Friday, 9 to 5 job in an office. Preferably insurance of some sort. Surety would be nice. Mom dropped broad hints.
I understand surety bonding very well. In fact, I edited my father’s textbooks on the subject, which only increased my knowledge of the subject matter. But it wasn’t for me. I had a talent for writing, and became a technical writer instead. Dad applauded, Mom fumed.
My dad was a project manager for DOD contractors and my mom was a CPA in cost accounting who ended up more in database mangement.
Im an English teacher, which is obviously very different, but their careers had a profound influence on me: both my parents had jobs that were really about systems, and we analyized systema all the time. I’ve had about as much professional success as you can while staying in the classroom (and Im pretty addicted to the classroom), and its all because I’m good at system analysis. And bad at work life balance.
Yeah, I also considered it briefly. But I’d been told it was a calling - you just knew if you were meant for a vocation, and it definitely wasn’t that for me. More like: Yeah, I guess I could do that… But I enlisted in the Navy instead.
My dad went to a Jesuit seminary - it’s so weird seeing him in the cassock and collar in old photos. But he figured out pretty quick that he didn’t have a vocation either, and he joined the Marines! So maybe in a little way, I followed my dad, even tho I didn’t realize it at the time.
Teenage mouse was hell bent against following my father’s footsteps career-wise (he’s a great guy overall, and I’d be proud to emulate him as husband, father, worker, manager, friend and community leader). Same with my mother.
I ended up in a 30+ year career that has mostly been a mash up of both their fields (Accounting/Finance and Systems Development).
Ironically at one point in my mid-career I was hired by my father’s employer, and for six awkward weeks he reported to me. He was near the end of a multi-year glide-path to retirement, taking on less demanding roles and handing over more complex projects to others. Fortunately, I did not get to the point of having to do his performance review! Good thing he got out when he did, just before Business Casual and Open Floor Plan. Would have killed him.
