I heard that, too, but the nuns emphasized it might be a quiet voice that urged you to take the veil, so I figured I might have missed it.
I forgot to mention that my mother considered becoming a teaching nun before she met Dad. She was an excellent teacher, and some of her students kept in touch for the rest of her long life. My students loved her from afar, as she factored in my lesson plans now and then, particularly in history classes, where I talked about her experiences as a new immigrant, a poor kid during the Depression, and a riveter in an airplane factory during WWII. (Her daytime job was at Sears HQ. She did the night shift to help the war effort.) Once my students convinced me to call her during class. They’d brought in immigration questions to ask her, so I could justify the call. At the end of the conversation, she said, “And I love you all.” They loved her right back.
Sorry for that sidetrack. She was a modest person who didn’t believe in bragging. I hope I don’t sound like I’m bragging about her. I guess you can tell I miss her.
Same here. While I suspect that I’m a touch younger than @What_Exit, I was 12 when the Berlin Wall came down and still at a young [more]-impressionable age a year later when The Hunt for Red October came out–both of those broadened my eyes to a bigger world than just what Top Gun did a few years earlier. My path though was a ‘long game’ of developing options as I went along.
My family had zero experience with the military, but I’d always wanted to be a pilot, so Mom & Pop were supportive. My eyesight went south in middle school, but I followed my talents and studied Electrical Engineering while going through ROTC. Air Force comissionin’ in ‘99, with a follow on of EOD badge-earnin’ in '09, and an early retirement in late ‘15. Capitalizin’ on that Engineering and Weapons experience, I started with my current employer and have been here since.
It is a diametrically opposite career path than the manufacturing & sales my Pop & Uncle are in. But I am happy to have gone this way, and everyone in my family is happy and supportive. Between the Air Force and ‘here’ though, Pop did invite me to join the family business, but it still breaks my heart to remember apologetically turning him down, “Pop, I’m sorry, I can’t . . . I don’t know sales nor [his product]. I know [weapons].” I had been out West for 17 years at this point, and had (and still have) no desire to go back to the East Coast. I’ll see him for the first time in awhile this fall when he & Mom come to visit me, so I’ll get to have that heart-to-heart with him.
I’m also really pleased with the path that got me here, 'cause had I taken up his offer and ‘gone home,’ I never would have met my current bride. She is an amazing woman, who took me (and my two li’l doods) in to create the best damn blended-kitty family in town.
Tripler
I found a niche career, way outside of the family.
Sort of. My father worked in marketing, though he was originally in sales (specifically, business-to-business sales). Later, he ran a hardware store, and later still, he became a professor with the university extension, specializing in doing marketing consulting for small businesses.
I’d originally planned to get a degree in meteorology, but I talked myself out of that just before college (I was daunted by the amount of high-level math involved), and I went into marketing, in no small part because I was familiar with it from my dad.
However, I wound up in a different kind of job than he ever had: I started out in market research, before moving into advertising, as a strategist.
I come from a long line of factory workers and manual laborers, so no I had no role models in my family to guide me towards my Mechanical Engineering career. I guess the only influence they had on me was that I definitely did not want to work in a factory my whole life, having seen the affect it had on my family. I almost flunked out of college after my first year, but was able to pull myself back up and continue with the knowledge that my only perceived option at the time was to go back home and set my goals lower, which was not going to happen.
I had no idea what an engineering career would entail, even after four years of school. I left school with a high level of math and science capabilities, top of my class technical wise. I was rather taken off guard when every employer wanted to put me in front of a computer and do some type of CAD work or simulation analysis along with my “real” engineering work of solving problems.
I sit here now on the edge of retirement and look back at all the things I’ve done and places I’ve gone thanks to my perseverance and I’m glad that I stuck to it. Most of my high school friends that I still talk with are envious of the things that I have accomplished and my ability to go into retirement with options that they could not even fathom. Therefore, I guess I did what I set out to do. Still, if I had known about other career options I might have been great at many other things.
On my mother’s side I there’s 3 uncles that went into education. One got a PhD and became a prof. A second ended up with a Maters and became a high school teacher then principal. The third got a PhD, went into college administration and eventually wound up as president of his alma mater.
Not bad for people from a family of poor famers who headed west for a better life in the 1930s.
My older sibling also got a PhD and became a prof and assistant dean.
Buuuuut: The only thing that the family pushed was going to college. It was on the first day of class freshman year that I had a class taught by a TA. They explained what that was, etc. and I thought “I’m going to do that.” 3 years later I walked into a class, told them I was a TA and what that meant. PhD and academic career ensues.
My parents graduated from the same teaching college with bachelor’s degrees in Mathematics. After a brief stint in the Army as a linguist my dad wound up doing computer programming for the DOD (as a civilian), and retired as a Subject Matter Expert for a few now-defunct database systems. Mom actually taught for a while but eventually joined him at the same agency, also doing something computer-related; more along the lines of being a sys admin.
I never displayed any interest in or aptitude for math. If I didn’t look so much like both of my parents we all would have wondered if I’d been switched in the hospital nursery. My bachelor’s degree is in Communications, with a concentration in radio broadcasting. Unlike XOldiesJock, I never wanted to be a DJ (though I had on-air shifts at my college’s station all four years, and was station manager my senior year); I wanted to do radio production. The part-time radio job I had when I graduated evaporated a month or so later when the station automated some of its weekend programming, and I was never able to get back into radio. After several years of temping, I learned about/fell into technical writing…and discovered that I was good at it. That led to an M.A. in English and eventually to proposal writing, which led to proposal management, which led to project management (which is what I’m doing now). I never wanted to work for the government – at first, just because both of my parents did – but I wound up moving to the DC area for my first tech writing job and have spent the last 26 years in government contracting.
No one was even close to my career path in my family. My father was in the Marine Corps in 1945 and I joined the Army but his was hardly a career. He signed up for the duration plus 6 months.
My bachelor’s degree is in Communications, with a concentration in radio broadcasting. Unlike XOldiesJock, I never wanted to be a DJ (though I had on-air shifts at my college’s station all four years, and was station manager my senior year); I wanted to do radio production. The part-time radio job I had when I graduated evaporated a month or so later when the station automated some of its weekend programming, and I was never able to get back into radio. After several years of temping, I learned about/fell into technical writing…and discovered that I was good at it. That led to an M.A. in English and eventually to proposal writing, which led to proposal management, which led to project management (which is what I’m doing now). I never wanted to work for the government – at first, just because both of my parents did – but I wound up moving to the DC area for my first tech writing job and have spent the last 26 years in government contracting.