When I was a kid, I wanted to be an inventor, like Edison and Bell and Marconi.
Or at least a discoverer like Mme. Curie.
But basically create or discover something that would be around long after me.
Now I work on things I hope won’t be obsolete before they are released.
And instead of inventing, I’m forecasting and promoting.
What about you? Have ballerina shoes in the closet and a paper hat waiting for you at the drive thru checker window?
I thought that I was pretty far away from my childhood dreams, until I found one of those fill-in-the-blank scrapbooky type things that I had when I was 8. There was a section about education & jobs, and under “what do you want to be when you grow up?” I had written “computer programmer.”
Guess I made my dream come true. Sheesh, I shoulda put “bazillionaire” down.
I wanted to be an astronaut.
I work in a call center.
I wanted to be a bikini inspector. 
Well I’m not fully in a career yet but I suppose I’m in the academic field. I can’t recall what I wanted to be when I was a kid other than a cyborg. I’d now gladly spend the rest of my life working in my family bookstore if I thought it was viable. The bright lights and hooohah of everywhere else doesn’t really appeal.
I wanted to design computer networks. I design computer networks.
Some people write whole novels or series of novels to express what you managed to in two sentences.
I wanted to write children’s books, especially joke books, and of course draw all the pictures.
I am in the creative arts; I teach high school pottery and ceramics.
I was utterly convinced I was going to be a psychologist since 4th grade. Of course, that was back before I had any clue about psychology beyond intro-level stuff and being related to a paranoid schizophrenic.
Well, now it looks like I’m going to be doing some kind of social work with latinos thing, conjunct with the study of immigration and U.S. foreign policy.
If someone had told me that I would be dedicating my life to an unpopular issue that most people don’t support, and maybe not even gasp get my Ph.D., and definitely not make much money in the process, I probably wouldn’t have believed it.
For one thing, I hated politics and anything to do with government. The idea of excitedly writing research papers on NAFTA and the Mexican agricultural industry would have had me rolling on the floor.
Secondly, I hate pissing people off. And nothing pisses people off faster–on either side of the debate–than immigration. I would have never dreamed that my future career would ever be controversial.
On the other hand, my career hasn’t really started yet, owing to my need for more schooling, and there’s a decent chance I’ll end up working in a community mental health clinic as a bilingual counselor. So maybe that ‘‘psychology’’ dream was not too far off, in a roundabout way.
Either way, I NEVER saw it coming.
I can’t decide which is sadder.
I wanted to be a deep sea diver.
I’m a quality assurance technician…but I have SCUBA gear in my closet.
I wanted to be a scientist. But I came to believe it would be too hard for me. For example, someone bought me a circuit design kit, where if you hook A to B, and B to C, and C to D, you’ll have a door alarm, or some other marginally useful thing. But the explanations for why design X performed function Y were so difficult that I could never go beyond the pre-designed things and make something of my own. (I was probably 7 at the time, which didn’t help.) So I guess the dream kind of faded. Now I know that I am actually more than smart enough to be a successful academic or research scientist, but I didn’t figure that out until it was too late.
I wanted to be an astronaut.
I’m almost a psychologist.
Not close at all, but I still have a pipe dream that I’ll be an astronaut eventually. Surely there is a need for a psychologist on-board the space shuttle.
I wanted to play music with other people, in public and in the studio. I’ve done that.
Then, I wanted to be a radio announcer, and I’ve done that. After a long hiatus from radio, I’m back working as an announcer again, and will most likely do so until retirement age.
I never really wanted to do or be anything else, but I always knew what I wanted to do when I grew up.
In the mid-1960’s I drove my mother crazy trying to find a toy I described to her - it was kind of like a TV screen & you drew pictures on it & you could turn them around. I was describing a CAD system, I think.
I am now a consultant in the computer industry. Close enough.
I wanted to be a writer.
I work as the assistant director of international programs at a small college. Most of my work involves logistics, counseling students about education abroad, and promoting our own and other good international programs. There’s some writing, but not as much as I’d like. It’s not what I dreamed of doing, but it’s not a bad gig.
Fairly close. I remember seeing copies of the Wall Street Journal when I was a kid.
I don’t work on Wall Street, but I am a stockbroker.
I wanted a job that would take me all over the world. I didn’t have a clear idea which job that would be, but ‘diplomat’, ‘anthropologist’ and ‘writer for National Geographic magazine’ may have been the sort of options suggested by amused adults.
With that advice ringing in my ears I studied anthropology and politics at a university near the shores of the North Sea, but never got anywhere near the South Seas of my professors’ field work. Also I probably wouldn’t have passed any Foreign Office vetting process…
In the end I fell into international development when I was in my mid 20s, and my jobs have taken me to most of the countries in Latin America and the Caribbean, and some parts of the Middle East that most visitors don’t get to.
Although I no longer get the same kick out of travel as I used to, I still have to pinch myself from time to time to confirm that my dream actually came true.
Well, when I was really young, I wanted to be an actress/model/ballerina/artist, like all 5-year-olds.
My first college major was equine pre-veterinary, but that quickly changed to english with the thought of going towards teaching composition. But I never finished my first year.
Nine years later, I’m the bookkeeper at a costume shop. Go figure.
Can you imagine Christmas at the DudleyGarrett household?
I dunno about “childhood dreams” (what child growing up in the 1970s “dreamed” about becoming a computer programmer?), but I do vividly remember the day in college when some smart-alecky student engaged our PLT professor (“Programming Languages and Translators”, on compilers and parsers and how they work) in a five-minute long aside on how a specific piece of sample code to navigate the symbol tree at link-time could be optimized for time. Eventually the professor decided the hijack was becoming less something instructional than simply an ego show, and ended the sidebar discussion with the comment, “We can continue this innnteresting discussion when you undertake designing compilers as a graduate dissertation. But in all likelihood, you and most of the rest of the class will become Software Engineers, and won’t need to worry too much about shaving 2 CPU cycles at link-time. You will be paid to spend most of the rest of your life sorting and hashing.”
I thought he was joking. I didn’t realize that, at bottom, he was right.