What did you dream of doing as a child and/or what career did you study for vs what career are you actually pursuing now?
NB: vague answers on what you do now are fine, no need to “out” your real identity
In my case, my dream was to be a scientist (a famous scientist, naturally), probably in theoretical physics, and the short answer is: I’m not a scientist. Instead I worked in software development, and now product management.
However the dev and management work I do is within science and R&D.
I never had a serious dream job - I did think I should be a rock star or a famous actress or an author, but never seriously enough to pursue any of those. I figured it would just happen if it was meant to be. More realistically, I figured I’d have a proper “girl” job (that’s how I saw it in the 60s) - teacher, secretary, wife and mother, but not nurse - icky bodily fluids…
I was going to college to prepare for a teaching career when I decided I hated being in school and I didn’t really want to teach, so I joined the Navy. That led me eventually to becoming an engineer and working as both a Mechanical Engineer and an Aerospace Structural Engineer over the course of 26 years. Never in my young life would I have foreseen such a path, but it suited me and it worked out well.
I’m somewhat envious of those who knew early on what they wanted to do and followed through. My career path was mostly a series of “Sure, why not - I’ll give it a try” rather than a well-planned journey. It was a good journey, tho. No real regrets.
In high school I wanted to make wine and grow grapes. I studied petroleum engineering in school because I chose a school that didn’t offer enology and viticulture. Now I design, build, and operate distilleries, wineries, and breweries. I love making booze it will definitely be my retirement job and it’s easy enough I’ll end up doing it until I’m on my death bed. Right now I’m just working until I have the $26 million I need to build the operation my way.
I studied aerospace engineering and had planned to go into the Navy and become a pilot. Instead, I’m an IT network engineer running an IT department for the state, so kind of far off my original plans.
I was never exposed to much more than factory work my entire childhood, so I didn’t have much first hand knowledge of other options but knew I didn’t want to work in a factory. Then a couple of engineers showed up at my school for carrier day and I knew that is what I wanted to be, a mechanical engineer. I knew I was very good at math and science, so this seemed like a good fit for me. Had a rocket scientist showed up maybe I would have wanted to be one.
So here I am at 60, been a mechanical engineer for over 35 years now and spent the first 20 years of my career jumping from job to job to take on interesting project without a concern for corporate politics and ladder climbing, never more than 2 years at one place although I did go back to a couple for specific projects. I’ve worked in automotive, medical and aerospace industries and have top of the line 3D CAD skills that allowed me to go anywhere. I took a direct job with a major automotive audio supplier and stayed there for 17 years and worked my way up the ladder to a Product Development Manager before I took an earlier retirement. Had I been interested in climbing the ladder I likely would have made it to VP level somewhere as many of my friends have done., but like I said I didn’t really want to pursue that.
Now I am working for a former customer in the automotive audio field and know this is where I want to be. I have five more years until I fully retire and not upset to be working until 65 because I love what I do.
When I was a little kid, I wanted to be a truck driver. Watching my dad drive a car was plenty cool, but when I look over at the lane next to us and see a guy piloting a huge truck with all manner of exotic cargo and driving all sorts of places, hey, that looked like one cool job.
As a teenager, right up through starting college, I wanted to be a fighter pilot. Long before finishing college that wore off, partly because of my dad’s own experience as a Navy (non-fighter) pilot: when he left the Navy, he had a very difficult time finding a civilian engineering job with his degree. In the end I stuck with school all the way through a doctorate degree, and have been working as a mechanical engineer in the automotive industry. Plenty of armchair interest in aviation, but I’ve never actually flown a plane, except for maybe a minute or so of cruise time holding the yoke of a Beechcraft Bonanza when I was a passenger.
I wanted to be a writer as a kid, then when I got older I wanted to be a comedy writer in the TV industry. I went to college for journalism and in my sophomore year I found out they were looking for interns for the Conan O’Brien show. I asked my department if I could use that towards my internship credit, and they approved, but I was flat out too scared to up and leave home and go to NYC to pursue my dream (if I was even accepted). I did my internship at cleveland.com instead. By the time I graduated with my journalism degree I was no longer in to journalism (I didn’t want to cover city hall like they told us we would do, I wanted to do magazine features) and I started my own web development business instead.
I still dream of being a comedy writer all the time. But I do like web development, and I LOVE my hometown and living near my family. I am not disappointed that I chose living here over living in NYC or LA, I’m just disappointed that I couldn’t pursue my dream here.
From age 5 or so, up until age 17, I planned to be a TV meteorologist. As a high school junior, I took a look at the meteorology program at the University of Wisconsin (where I wound up going for college), and the class requirements. I said to myself, “that is a helluva lot of high-level math and physics!”, and decided to become a marketing major.
I’ve had a good career as a market researcher and advertising strategist, but I still often think about what it would have been like to work in meteorology instead.
As a child, I wanted to be a veterinarian. In high school, I thought about computer game design and programming. I actually went to college for graphic design. Now I do commercial landscape estimating and planning which… basically uses none of those things and has very little overlap.
My job came from the first place to accept my application on my 16th birthday being a retail plant nursery and from there getting hired by another nursery that also had a design department, then working estimating there before jumping to other companies a couple more times. Basically, I could have skipped all that school and still landed where I am.
The nearest I ever had to a dream job was wanting to work in a lab. Got a degree in chemistry, worked in labs and pharmaceutical manufacturing pilot plants (mostly) for 13 years, then somehow drifted into medicines licensing (specializing, obviously, in the testing, dosage form design and manufacturing that I had been hands on at). In truth, by then, I had had enough of labs. So much for dream jobs.
Then, specializing in my own little corner of medicines licensing, I was able to pretty effectively monetize those 13 years of hands-on experience. In the UK I only knew of one other person in medicines licensing (industry side) who had the same depth of background that I did (there may have been others I didn’t know, of course, but it’s a small world).
Of course, technology advances. Eventually new stuff that I had no experience of came along. But by a quirk of happy timing, so did retirement. I got out at the right time.
My dream retirement job is anything that has zero to do with technology. I was thinking about doing the whole forged-in-fire knife building thingy. Something suitably low tech but that looks fun. The reality will probably be retire, die of heart attack the next day…
Childhood dream: Airline pilot. As I discovered more and more health issues precluding this, I had to find something else. Retired now, but my final job was programming flight controls for both manned and unmanned air vehicles. Although the airlines were unlikely to hire me, I still managed a First Class medical with a few waivers and spent the last 30 years as a flight instructor.
Shameless bragging follows:
Although I never made it to an airline cockpit, a lot of my students did. A few students became instructors, who themselves taught future airline pilots – so I can claim I have “grand-students” flying the airlines now.
In addition, I worked on the secondary flight controls software for the 747-400 and one of my students was flying those until a few years ago. So for a while, I could claim that 747s were crossing the Atlantic in which I’d taught both the plane and the pilot to fly. A bit of a reach, but a good story to tell at the bar.
I wanted to be a science fiction writer. It’s not my actual job, but I’ve had some success doing it, with two novels and over 50 short stories published.
I do computer support. When I was a kid, the job didn’t exists.
When I was a child, I wanted to be a paleontologist. I always did well in school and had good grades, but I realized that studying ancient animals would involve going to digs, and my allergies were bad enough that was a deal-breaker. After college I got a job at an academic library. I’ll stay here until I retire!
As a kid, I wanted to be an archaeologist or a forest ranger.
After I started going to college, I realized that neither of those fields made enough money to plug up an ant’s ass. So I switched to business administration and got a job as a legal secretary, which I’ve been doing since 1979.
