I thought I really wanted to be a massage therapist. I interviewed massage therapists. I did massages on friends and family. I read tons of books. I saved for more than a year for massage therapy school. I moved myself and my husband changed jobs so I could go to the school.
By the end of the schooling the one thing I was really sure of was that I did not want to be a massge therapist. I was really good at it, had no problem mastering the techniques or the information, but it was just not the way I wanted to spend my working life.
Surely I can’t be only the one who made such a mistake.
My goal when I went to college was to become a professor of history. After a few years of observing my professors, and realizing exactly what the job would entail, I decided it just wasn’t for me. I felt that my professors were too isolated from the real world and spent too much time writing pointless articles that nobody ever seems to read. I wanted to teach college students, but that wasn’t the focus of being a professor. I ended up completing my degree and then moving on to the business world.
Not me, thank god (although I am NOT happy with my current career, it was never what I wanted to do anyway), this was my ex-boyfriend’s lab partner, whom I met on several occasions. He was in the last year of working on his PhD in chemistry, and had finally decided that after all that work, he didn’t want to be a chemist at all. He wanted to be a freaking lawyer.
Thought I really, really wanted to be in IT. Worked my ass off to get there, did well, had great jobs. And I really did enjoy it, and, I believe, was good at it. Then one day, I realized I just couldn’t be happy in it anymore… maybe because the better I got at it, and the higher I moved up, the more I got away from doing the things that I truly enjoyed in the first place. Go figure.
Now I want to work with chimpanzees. Desperately. But that has been a lifelong dream - since I was about 9 or so - so maybe that’s really what I want to do. Or maybe I really want to be a professional photographer? Or… a writer? How about a freelance conservationist writer - working with chimps, writing articles (with photos) about their plight?
Who knows? My problem is, I want a million things so deeply, so passionately. Once I get them, I lose all interest. This applies to my career, my hobbies, my relationships, everything. It’s a terrible trait.
I’ve had a few. Through most of college I thought I wanted to be an attorney. Nope. One summer working in a law firm cured me of that. I didn’t hate it, but I was much more into crunching the numbers and doing the analysis than I was the actual legal bits.
Fell back on my minor and crammed some courses into my senior year and started life as an auditor. Nope. That wasn’t for me either. Auditing (at least in the beginning) wasn’t about crunching numbers and doing analysis. It was about being really, really detail oriented. Not for me.
Decided to marry the two (auditing and law) and got my MBA in order to become a litigation consultat. Worst move yet. It’s hard to describe why I hated being a litigation consultant. All the work I did makes great copy–it sounds really interesting. Actually doing it was pure drugery (along with a hefty side of dealing with really pissy clients/attorneys/other consultatants, somthing I can deal with now but at the time it just ate me up).
Course corrected once again and went into marketing (I’d had an internship in marketing). Suprised me how analytical it really was. I’ve been in that career for 11 years now.
I wanted to be a journalist since about 10th grade (“writer” before that). By the time I was a senior I was all signed up to go to Kent State for journalism. Lucky me, they have one of the best j-schools in the country.
I went and did well. They actually do have a great school. I enjoyed interviewing people and writing cool feature stories. I enjoyed working for the paper and the magazines.
But by the end of my senior year at college, I had learned enough about real journalism to realize it wasn’t for me. I didn’t want to work at a newspaper or cover political events or even deal with editors and their egos.
During my 4.5 years at college I learned alot about Web design. I interned at cleveland.com (combining newspaper and web skills). At some point in my college career, a friend of my brother’s said he wanted to start a Web design company and needed someone who knew HTML.
So I graduated cum laude with my BS in journalism, and promptly began working full-tilt with this guy and we started our own Web design busines and have been doing quite well since 2001.
Some time ago, Terrorcotta and I wanted to run a used paperback bookstore. We bought used books at garage sales and flea markets in bulk, eventually amassing thousands of them that we housed in a storage locker. But as we did so, we worked to support ourselves in other way, and as we became more and more familiar with what used bookstore owners do (stay in the same place, six or seven days a week) and how little money they make as a general rule, we realized we didn’t wanna do it. So we sold the books and went on with our respective careers, eventually landing good jobs in both, but doing a lot os useless shit work for morons in the process.
I thought I wanted to work in the sciences, either as a high school teacher or a doctor. I majored in a science and hated it every step of the way. I graduated from college, joined the army, and eventually married my hobby with library science, and I’ve been doing that happily for a number of years.
The lesson I learned is that you can’t make yourself love something. Your loves in life choose you, not the other way around.
Through most of my undergrad education, I was intending to be a teacher. After two semesters of teaching freshmen English in grad school, I knew it wasn’t for me, and got my second Masters in Library Science, with the idea of working in an archival or research library. While the few short-term jobs I had in traditional libraries were okay, it didn’t really interest me as much as I thought it would.
What I do for a living now: I manage the website for a tiny federal agency. I’ve been doing this for 8 years, and enjoy it very much.
The funny thing is that this isn’t a job I could have planned for during my college years, since the Internet as we know it today didn’t exist back then. We talked about hypertext and online resources in library school, but it was mostly theoretical, and I didn’t actually see a web browser until 1994, two years after I graduated; a year after that, I was considered an html expert.
I don’t think it’s a terrible trait at all. I do the same thing as most people here are describing - I just have serial interests (one after the other), instead of having life-long interests. You just have to figure out how to make it work for you, instead of against you. For example, I’ve been a temp for nine years now. Lots of people hate starting new jobs, but it suits someone like me just fine. (Now, if we could just get the working conditions improved…)
I always wanted to be an internet helpdesk technician. Then I got the job, and found I really, really just don’t like talking to people all that much. I enjoy fixing the problems and being all techy, but the talking to idiots who don’t know their right mouse button from their arsehole is a bit trying. I think I’d be happier in web/email based support, but I really don’t know where I could get a job like that.
Failing that, I’d really like to become an editor. But I have no qualifications.
I went through two separate phases of wanting to be a professor, but it never panned out. I did finish a Ph. D., but the places that I wanted to teach at didn’t want to hire me, and the places that wanted to hire me, I didn’t want to teach at. A few years down the road, I’m kind of glad I didn’t go that direction. As has been expressed elsewhere in this thread, I feel that professors (especially in my field, engineering) tend to lose touch with real problems. They only choose certain kinds of cleanly solvable problems, which tend to be easier than “real” problems, and then use the rest of their time coming up with inflated and baroque explanations of what they’ve done. I also can do without the silly salesmanship that passes for grant writing these days.
Graphic Designer. Was always pretty good in art. Won several awards in gradeschool and had 2 pieces of my work published before I was 18. Went to school for design, graduated, got a job, and promptly hated it. Was devastating to see what the real world of design was. Deadlines, no time for real effort, it was just do it as fast as you can. I started to care less and less about the quality and just about doing good enough so my boss wouldn’t have a hernia.
Teaching. Long story short: I can’t deal with indifferent parents and students and intrusive policies from downtown anymore. If I’m honest, I’m neither the most nurturing teacher for primary age students nor the most level-headed disciplinarian or grader. I’m foundering between career paths right now, unsure of what I will do next.
Perhaps you should just get involved in the HelpDesk, technical support call center or manual writing divisions for any number of large technical firms
I was undecided in college for about 2 years and then thought I wanted to be an elementary school teacher. I took the classes and did the participations and everything went well until I got to the student teaching, where I failed miserably. To make a long story short, I blamed anything and everything for my failure. I should have known the first time around it was not for me when I found myself dreading going into class to face those little bastards that tormented me every day I was there. But… I perservered, partially because of ignorance, partially because of my parents, and tried again. The college of education at the university I was going to said I could try the student teaching again with a different teacher/mentor and a different grade level… and I failed miserably again.
So now I am a systems administrator for a school system.
I have a love-hate relationship with teaching. I couldn’t decide what to do in college, but I’ve always loved kids and I like to read and tell people about cool random facts.
It’s never been a secret that teachers don’t make enough money but I thought I’d get married and have a husband who made more money and that we’d get by. Well, my husband is on disability and doesn’t make a whole lot. Cost of living is going up…my daughter is ready for phase 2 of her braces and I’m really feeling this lack of money.
I still love the helping aspect of teaching…I love the kids. I hate the fact that I have little autonomy…I have to always teach what they want me to teach in the way that **they ** want me to teach. And the pay, which I already mentioned.
So I want a job related to education where I can work with kids, but I can make more money… about 50% more.
I wanted to be a journalist ever since I was about 7. So I went to college and became one. Good Og, so much stress for so little pay? No benefits, hideous hours, and substandard working conditions, too. I stuck it out for almost six years, mostly as an editor, then I bailed and went into graphic design. (I know, odd choice for a backup career.)
