After graduating from university, I am in a bit of a pickle. All my life i have wanted to be a clinical psychologist, but now i am halfway there to being one i am wondering if i actually do want to be a CP…However the problem is i don’t think i’ll know how happy i will be until i am fully qualified, and by then after 8 years of studying it will be too late.
My question is how did you decide what career to have? Were your childhood dreams of becoming a nurse/astronaut/fireman reliable, or did you only really know once you had left school and started working?
I was in high school, volunteering as a library aide. One day, they asked me to go help out in the little TV studio the school had.
I spent the rest of the day in a euphoric daze. I took all the broadcasting courses the school had to offer, majored in Radio/TV broadcasting in college, and have been working in my career field ever since.
It’s not my current career, but I did go to school for it and it’s still a hobby.
When I was in 5th grade, I was listening to my brother’s Deep Purple album. I thought it would be really cool if my friends and I set up a little stage in my garage, put that album on, and played air guitar to it. We could charge admission. No, wait, instead of playing air guitar, we could learn to play real guitars and play those songs ourselves! No, wait, we could write our OWN songs! Yeah, and grow long hair, and become rock stars! Within 15 minutes of my original thought, I was on the phone to my friends. Within a few days, we’d figured out how to play Smoke on the Water.
Had a work-study job in college doing market research, decided that it interested me, and happened to be lucky enough to be already going to a school where a program in market research was offered.
My problem is that i don’t know whether i feel more passion for clinical psychology or educational psychology…OR, become a nurse and specialise in critical care or psychiatric nursing.
I never did decide, stuff just kind of happened. (I guess that’s why I always laugh when Pigkiller says “PLAN? There ain’t no plan!” in Thunderdome.) But anyway, I dropped out of school, worked a while in a variety of jobs, went back to school, worked some more, and retired. And I still don’t know what I want to be when I grow up.
I did it the hard way (am doing it, actually). I got a degree, got a job, worked at it (and 2 different companies) for a few years, realised I hated it with a passion and didn’t want to imagine turning it into a career, even in another department/field of the same industry, thought long and hard about what did interest me, and now I’ve gone back to school for another degree. Here’s hoping this one sticks! I’m 27 years old and I’m still searching for “what I want to be when I grow up” but I have a better idea now than after my first pass through university!
My decision to want to be a psychologist wasn’t really thought out well. I come from a family where a lot of emotional neglect was going on, and the idea of people paying constructive attention to one another, and the idea of understanding people better, was, on a subconsicous level, very attractive to me. The image I had of being a psychologist I got mainly from romantic novels, like " I never promised you a rose garden".
I wish now I had paid better attention to the actual jobs open to those “working with people” and the best way, educationwise, to get into them. For instance, in the Netherlands only licensed psychotherapists’ clients get reimbursed from their insurance; if you aren’t licensed, that means far fewer clients. But getting a license has nothing to do with how good you are or how long you’ve studied. You only get it by becoming a member of a very specific, professional union whose main reason for existing is to keep the number of licenced psychologists down, to create an artificial demand.
On the whole, I’d say anyone interested in studying something should check out two things:
If you actually like doing it. The only way to find that out is doing volunteer work or trying out a summer entry-level job in your chosen field. For instance, my nephew, who is a bit of a poser, often said he’d wanted to be a writer; but he didn’t actually write anything. He just liked the idea of being a writer.
How, exactly to get ito your chosen work field. What education, what job experience is necessary? Any other hurdles? This is done best by talking to somebody working in the field.
I love it… but if you’d asked me if this is what I wanted to do when I was 6 years old, I’d probably have rolled my eyes at you and told you that I was going to be a vet. No one dreams of being a process analyst.
It wasn’t easy, though. There were about 5 years of holy-crap-what-the-hell-am-I-doing moments interspersed with crappy customer service jobs and bare cupboards and negative balances in my bank account before I finally figured out a good direction for my life.
I switched ideas about what I wanted to be pretty frequently as I grew up, and even all the way through college – I sometimes wonder what would have happened if my Human Biology Core classes (2 hours of bio/chem) had been at a time other than 9 in the morning, which is pretty much o-dark-hundred to a poor college student.
I got punted out at graduation with with less than no idea of what to do with my new liberal arts degree done on the backs of dead white guys. (in other words, English. Surprisingly, there are a ton of things one can do with said degree if you take the time to explore. It doesn’t have to be teaching or panhandling on corners. )
My mother and aunt conspired to get me an internship as a technical writer at my aunt’s large software company employer. I shrugged because I had nothing better to do, and went along with it – and then found I liked the challenge well enough, and wound up interviewing for full time employment. Hey, I like eating as well as the next person.
Seven years later, here I am, doing technical writing for developers with the same company and loving the high pressure environment. I’d probably be bored to tears anywhere else.
Apparently this isn’t unusual - I still don’t know. I’ve stumbled upon a career in software test that’s totally unrelated to my degree in Environmental Science. But I really want to be a lumberjack.
LOL. Yeah, I didn’t want to be a market researcher (or, these days, an advertising strategic planner) as a kid. I wanted to be a TV weatherman. Or a used-car salesman. I acknowledge I got lucky, in finding, early on, a career that I was (a) good at, and (b) interested in.
If I look at my friends from college (most of whom have gone on to be at least reasonably successful), fewer than half of them are doing today (20 years later) what they thought they’d be doing / went to school for.
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