Another one chiming in to say she fell into hers - I was supposed to be an award-winning actress by now, damn it!
I am having a bit of a quandary myself. I abandoned the culinary field to follow my original childhood dream of becoming an architect. I am just finishing up my first year of college, at the age of 26… i mean 27 (Oh yea, its my birthday!). Problem is, I don’t know if I want to continue with architecture, or switch to architectural engineering. There is surprisingly little overlap between the two programs, so the sooner I make my choice, the fewer wasted classes I will have to take.
Next year, I am taking the only two courses required by both programs, and the calculus, physics, and chemistry courses I need before I can apply for a transfer to the engineering college. Most of those math and science credits will count as electives for Architecture, but after next year, I need to settle on a major.
The choice is hard enough to make with out the consideration of money (engineering tuition is higher) and time (Architecture is a 6 year program including grad school, I have 5 left, but can do it in 4.5. Engineering is only 4 years, but I basically haven’t even started that yet.)
So, Hell, What do I do?
I was in 8th grade and during “career week” there were all these oversize cards with 1 job per card. One of them was “Commercial Artist” and that was it. I knew I loved drawing and I was pretty good at it. So the childhood dreams were pretty reliable, but years and years later after art college, I got into the working world and I got to know the pros & cons of the field a bit more intimately.
After about a decade in the field, I discovered that I didn’t want to sell shit (advertising & marketing) or just design the wrapper or packaging for products. I wanted to use design as a way to contribute, rather than (in my view) add to the noise in society. So I determined that book publishers (and a few others) would be one of the few areas I could do something a little more rewarding, but still within my job skills. As it turned out, one of those “few others” became an opportunity, and that’s where I’m currently working. Yay!
So the short version is: (a) determine what you’re good at, (b) be honest about what you care about, and © find the place where they overlap. But realize that it’s a journey and isn’t going to happen overnight.
Somehow when I was 10 I decided I wanted to be a veterinarian. My family, realizing they couldn’t sway me away from that, decided to let me shadow a vet (close family friend). Turns out I ended up enjoying it even more! 
After I got accepted to vet school I looked around and realized the profession is full of crazy clients sorry!, and that if I wanted to stay sane, I couldn’t do private practice for the next 40 years of my life.
Luckily, I got seduced to the dark side of pathology. 
The more I learned about it, the more interested I became. So I applied and will soon start a combined PhD/residency program in anatomic pathology.
And really, deep down, I feel that I always went that way. I’ve always wanted to know WTF the animal really had… and I was the weird kid that was fascinated by the dead pigeons, bats, and rats on the road (to the point of having to be told to move by my relatives).
BTW, Mnemos, biochemistry is required for my program… I may need your help with mnemonics again… History likes Argentine because it is basic? 
Yeah, and I ate acid and it was a negative experience!
Sadly, I don’t think I can really help you this time around; although I remember those, I really don’t remember anything particularly in-depth anymore! It has been way too long!
I never had specific career dreams.
I discovered my vocation when I was four, but it wasn’t for a career; it was for a very bourgeoise flavor of freedom. To me, discovering your vocation is what happens when you discover that there is something you can do that you hadn’t known before - and realize that’s what you want to do. Me, I discovered it was possible to travel without your parents 
and make your own decisions about where to live and what to read, but of course this means that just “leaving home and squatting somewhere” was out of the question: I wanted to leave home but taking my books with me, thank you much.
How I chose my major: I had a list of “stuff I can do and which doesn’t send me into fits with boredom/the yuks”, I lived in a country where it was about impossible to go into a science major and pay for it yourself, I had parents who weren’t willing to let me get a vocational degree or most of the stuff in my list. The addition of all three came up with “either chemistry 1h away from ‘home’ or chem eng 6h away… chem eng, here I come!”
And yes, I do travel a lot, mostly without the parentals, and I read what I want to read. But in my case the vocation wasn’t linked to a specific degree, you see.
Still utterly clueless
Well actually, that’s not 100% accurate. I think I know what I should have been but passed that turn on the career highway many moons ago and now find myself stuck with financial demands that prevent straying from where I ended up.
What turn did I miss? Chef 101 combined with Restaurant Management 201
I did manage to teach myself the cooking skills over the years, the rest would still be a complete (and expensive) mystery.
I read the comic book series Secret Wars when I was about 15. I loved Doctor Doom and how he mastered physics to such an extent that he could take on the universe by himself. I decided then to become a research engineer, and sixteen years later, I don’t have a single regret.
In my professional life, that is. Like Dr. Doom, I’ve let my personal life go to rust.
I left college in the early seventies to become a carpenter. I joined the union as an apprentice, and four years later became a journeyman, just in time for the bottom to drop out of the construction industry during the Carter Administration. There was no carpentry work available, so I moved from job to job. The economy was a disaster under Carter, and times were difficult. I finally had a job running the tongue saw at a slaughter house. The slaughter house went belly up, and I was out of work again. I took the first job I could find, recharging fire extinguishers. a couple of months later, I moved up into installing Ansul systems in restaurants, and then to installing fire alarm systems. That was almost thirty years ago. I am now in charge of training, and I am the technician for our largest clients.
I always wanted to be a science fiction writer when I grew up (well, since around 1968 when I got the first Nebula Anthology, read about the Science Fiction Writers of America, and thought, “Gee, I’d love to be able to join that”).
Eventually, I managed.
As for my day job, I just fell into it. There were no personal computers or World Wide Web when I was growing up, but I developed a real affinity for them. I used to say that I had to wait ten years for them to invent the Web so I could have a career.
In other words, you don’t have to decide now. You can continue to get your degree and end up doing something completely unrelated. A degree is not destiny.
I’ve been writing for as long as I can remember and mostly just assumed I’d do that as a career. I tried out journalism in high school and stuck with it in college because of a lack of other options, but it was also more practical - and I was better at it - than screenwriting. So I’m working as a journalist, but hoping to move into fiction and nonfiction over the next few years.
Still don’t know. This is why I am trying to obtain a degree in Liberal Arts.
I wanted to go on to grad school and get my Ph.D. in medieval studies. I took a year off and then decided that the market sucked so hard for academics in that field that maybe I’d do something I could actually get a job at for a while, so I went to library school. Turned out to love it.
You mean there are people who do their jobs on purpose?
Okay, flip answer aside, this is pretty close. After all these years of dealing with the living, I think I’d prefer the dead. If I could start over, I’d look into becoming a diener or some flavor of mortician. (I don’t have any sense of smell, though…I always wonder if that would give me an edge or be a major handicap).
Many years ago, when I was 23, I was playing cribbage with my father (50 at the time) and my grandfather (76), and complained, with a certain amount of tongue in cheek, “I don’t know what I want to be when I grow up.” They looked at each other and said, “Me neither.”
I’m now 60, and to a certain degree feel the same way. Perhaps it’s more of the “I may age, but I refuse to grow up” mentality. In any event, it wasn’t until I was in my mid-30s that I found my current career as a writer and illustrator, which I love. As a kid I thought about aeronautical engineering, probably because of the way the words sounded. But nothing really grabbed me when I thought about the future. Eventually, I got a degree in Psychology and was getting ready to go to law school when I rebelled at the thought of more school.
I did a variety of things–substitute taught, delivered mail, ran a comic book store, managed a used diesel truck yard, and co-wrote a textbook on public speaking. All this time I also did some peripheral writing and illustrating–I always seemed to end up being the editor of organization newsletters, for one. It wasn’t until the growth of the personal computer market that it became evident to me in the early '80s that I could make a living with the writing and illustrating. I went to work for a software company.
Eventually I worked my way up to the director level, which I began to hate. For the last few years, however, I have been able to move laterally and get back to being an “individual contributor,” writing and illustrating and loving it all over again.
My older brother was graduated with a degree in English. He taught at a middle school, worked at a bookstore, worked as an editor at a large publishing house, and, in his early thirties went back and got a masters in enology. In a few years he was winemaker and general manager for a well-repected winery in the Napa Valley, winning national and international recognition for his wines. He retired a couple of years ago, but still makes wine with some of his buddies.
My point, I guess, is that it’s nice to know what you want to do at your age, but it’s not time to freak out if a clear path does not yet become evident.
Still don’t have a clue what I want to do when I grow up. Still don’t know if growing up is a good idea. Plenty of time for that later, I’m only 37. The lab tech position I’ve fallen into is pretty comfy + pays decent. Benefits are great and they’ll pay most of my kids’ college tuition if I stick around that long. I’ll probably retire from here.
I didn’t know. I was working in a very low-paying job and I fell in love. She said she wouldn’t marry me unless I had a better job.
I didn’t know what I wanted to do, but loved to read, so I took a chance a tried to write a book. It sucked, but I got a computer to type it on. Turned out I was kinda handy with the computer.
I figured I would learn to program and do that while I figured out what I wanted to do. Again, turned out I enjoyed doing it. I’ve been in the industry now almost 20 years.
When I was a child I wanted to be an acrobat. Then my dreams went domestic and I went all nesty. Now I wish I had been a librarian. I am currently a secretary, and enjoy researching and solving problems, organising info for my boss, helping customers, etc. As far as studying for a career, I studied broadcast electronics vocationally, worked full time in a broadcast support facility (duplication/edit/etc), before returning to nesting post-divorce. I’ve had many jobs: fast-food cook, live nude girl, duplication technical coordinator, housewife/mom, bartender, clerical temp. The funnest job was bartending at rock bars, fast-paced, like ballet with liquor bottles and shot glasses. I still wish I had gone to school for library sciences. I like organising and finding stuff. And reading.
If I had any advice for you I would say don’t worry about the rest of your life. Do what sounds best to you now. Careers have a way of evolving in unforseen ways.
Maybe I have a habit of judging character on irrelevancies, but I think anybody who chooses to go by I_Have_Hippos_In_My_Garden around here is going to do fine.
Brilliant replies thank you!they are all so reassuring.
I kind of (i say kind of because im still not completely sure) made a decision today to not go back to my research psychologist job. Over the past few years i have tutored children who suffer with autism, worked as a nurse in a psychiatric hospital, been a summer camp childrens leader, taught in a school in Zambia, worked in a premature baby unit in zambia and an orphanage in Sri Lanka.
Maybe its time to get away from mental health and children and go and work in a fairy shop, go travelling and be a bum and then come back and do what i want to do then?!