For me, the most interesting one happened in 1993, and it’s not hard to imagine why. Anyway, Lily Tomlin said back in the 1970s that if everyone became what they wanted to be when they were 6 years old, we’d have a world made up entirely of cowboys, firemen, nurses, and ballerinas - all of them very dangerous jobs that don’t often pay all that well.
My sister’s “School Days” book, purchased in the 1970s, had separate checklists for "I Want to Be A - " for boys and girls. For girls, it included “mother” but did not include “father” for boys. Interesting.
I don’t know the source of these percentages, which obviously add up to more than 100%.
I watched the Apollo 11 moon landing a few weeks before starting kindergarten, and I was as excited about being allowed to eat breakfast in the living room as I was about that. I also had a good comeback when I was told that girls couldn’t be astronauts; yeah, I wanted to be the first woman ON the moon, and that’s theoretically possible but it ain’t happening with current technology.
Back in 1960, I lived in a city and wanted to be a cowboy, a rancher, or a farmer, and while I would have enjoyed any of those occupations, I would likely not be sitting comfortably where I am today had I actually gone into one of those fields. I got into high tech when Silicon Valley was at its very beginning. They were desperate to hire anyone who could “pass the mirror test”.
Girls most certainly could be astronauts. Not many, but some. Damned few men either.
It was so obvious she was so much more amazingly capable than the rest of us mere USAF pilot trainees it wasn’t funny. Any thought I had about ever making the astronaut ranks died right there. And this was a decade before she was selected to try out for the astronaut corps. But you could tell she had stardom in her bones.
I wanted to be an archeologist. To the point, that when I was 8 and stuck at home for a couple months dealing with a nasty bout of pneumonia that kept me home from school [I did get ‘care packages’ of homework, yay.] I had gotten interested in egyptology, and discovered the wonders of the interlibrary loan system. So, I did the fair thing, and borrowed “First Steps in Egyptian” by E A Wallis Budge published in 1899ish. Then I renewed it. I kept it for the max allowable, 6 months =) I got a call from the Rochester Public Library telling me they would not renew it, so someone else would have a chance [I helpfully pointed out it had not been loaned out since 1934 …] and returned it.
I ended up a couple years later making friends with an archeologist that came to town to dig a mystery skeleton found under a parking lot [Not King Richard] that turned out to be a local indian that passed like a couple hundred years previously. That was when I determined that Archeology, especially Egyptian archeology was basically a dead end degree - you could find digs that paid for crap, stuff was so locked down it was difficult to actually get any sort of well paying work. This was well before cable tv and all the neat archeology stuff that gives archeologists actual work making money in their fields =) I was told I could add museology as a minor, and work in a museum. Yay.
I got reasonably proficient in transliterating heiroglyphics [changing owl leg water into letters ‘m’ ‘a’ ‘n’] and am reasonably decent at Egyptian history, but unfortunately needing to make a living pushed me elsewhere.
Wanted to be an astronomer. Got admitted to a uni that had a well-respected astronomy program, but with an undeclared major. Met with an older astronomy prof who explained the facts of life to her: Their one university graduated more astronomy undergrads per year than there were astronomer positions (not openings) in the whole USA. And the entry level degree for practicing astronomer was PhD, not bachelors. And it was then a highly male field.
My father sometimes flew the company plane and one time he took me up in it. After that I wanted to be a pilot and fly big jets.
Then when I was 12 I had to get glasses. There went that dream. Years later I ended up with a brother-in-law who flew into hurricanes in the Air Force and went on to be a commercial pilot.
I wanted to be a cartoonist. Turns out you need to be way better at being funny in a very specific way to make that work. And opportunities are thin on the ground and tend to be filled by people far more talented than me, and who don’t want to ever retire from a lucrative gig.
For a while there were a lot of young girls who wanted to be a Marine Biologist, I think because they wanted to swim with dolphins. I did go to school with someone who really did become one though.
I don’t remember how old I was when I first had to wear glasses for distance vision, but it must have been somewhere around that age. I thought it would be cool to be an airline pilot, and actually wrote a letter to a Canadian airline asking if you could still be a pilot if you wore glasses. Those were the days of courtesy in correspondence and most other things. Today a kid’s letter to a big company wouldn’t have a hope in hell of getting a response.. But I got one, telling me that no, you could not fly for them if you needed corrective vision (no longer true today, of course, but it was then).
I was also fascinated by the space program, and while I never aspired to be an astronaut, I did have dreams of working for NASA in some capacity. I wrote to them, too, asking for pictures from some of their missions like Mariner IV to Mars that would be far superior to stuff published in the media, and they, too, responded, and sent a young little me a full press kit!
When I learned at 5 or 6 that emergency vehicles could ignore traffic laws, that sealed it. I didn’t care about police work or fighting fires, I just wanted to drive fast. I never made a career of racing but I spent time on racetracks and usually owned a sensible car and fast and impractical one for weekend use. In later years, the place of the fast car was taken by even less sensible motorcycles.
My career was mostly repairing machinery used in semiconductor manufacturing.
When I was a kid I wanted to be either an architect or a pilot.
Then came real life and I went to study mechanical engineering. I’m very good with my hands and can fix damn near anything, so I thought a good fit. I had NO idea how much math was involved. Seemed like that’s all it was. I dropped it.
Had to take a programming class and hated that too. But, I had a very strong drafting background, and had started to fool with computers. I also liked art. That all sort of melted together and GIS was just taking off, so I ended up as a cartographer at first, then database/application work. My title when I retired was ‘GIS Application Engineer’.
Timing was everything. I got in on the ground floor of GIS.
I dreamed of being a paleontologist, inspired by the popular kiddie books of the time written by Roy Chapman Andrews about his exploits and dinosaur discoveries. But that’s not the sit-in-a-museum kind of paleontology - he fought bandits in the Gobi Desert and endured sandstorms!
Later on I thought maybe I wanted to become a priest. Then I hit puberty and that changed
I wanted to be an astronomer-- I was a nerd. My parents even got me a telescope for my 9th birthday, a pretty decent one on a tripod. I still remember my astonishment at seeing the craters of the magnified Moon through it for the first time.
Then I abandoned my dream of being an astronomer when I found out they had to do a lot of math. I was a bookish nerd, not a mathlete nerd.
The closest thing I came to wanting to do anything in particular was when I joined the Drama Club in high school. I liked acting, but didn’t think of it as a possible career. I was also a math nerd, and enjoyed chemistry class, so I started college as a chemistry major (I even got a student job as a lab assistant) but then I started hanging with the Theatre Department, took part in a few plays, and in my sophomore year I changed majors. I have a BFA in Theatre, but ended up shuffling papers for the Federal government for 30 years.
