Honestly didn’t know much about what I wanted to do. When I was really young I wanted to be a cop. Thank GOD I didn’t follow that. I grew up doing theater and thought I wanted to be an actor and tried hard but realized I hated auditioning and isn’t want a life of that.

But I’ve always been interested in tech and tinkering and found a job doing technical theater installing sound and light systems, running tech for musicals and such and it’s my favorite thing in the world.

Follow your passions. Whatever things you find fun and exciting I’m sure there’s a career out there for you. Try and put yourself out there and try anything that sounds remotely interesting and you’ll find what you’re looking for.

I wanted to work at CERN in high school, alcohol from 18-24 ruined whatever slim chance I had of accomplising that, and now I do manual labor for billionaires

i wanted to be a girl. now i am one.

follow your dreams, kids!

I wanted to be an astronaut, a common dream for a kid. Later I wanted to be a biologist. Of course as you can see, I'm definitely not an astronaut nor a biologist lmao

Wanted to be an architect, up until I was about 11 or 12. Then I wanted to be a Graphic Designer, which I now am!

A news anchor

I wanted to be a botanist/biologist, now as an adult, I work in a STEM field lol.

Game designer.

I’m a Director of Game Design now.

Astronaut. Space was my first love. At least up until about first/second grade (age 6-7).

Eventually, I became more interested in computers. My dad is a programmer in an IT capacity and he used to bring home parts from mainframes or servers. I was fascinated with these components. He would also write little QBasic programs for me that did cool graphical stuff, like colored bubbles floating on screen or colored "laser lines." He'd bring me to his office to see the "computer room," which was just like an entire floor of mainframes and servers and tape machines. I was amazed and thought I wanted to be programmer like him.

Around my preteen/teen yrs, I taught myself HTML/CSS and started making my own websites. By high school, I was taking programming classes.

I went to college for CS, but I also got a job as a part time website manager and email designer. Though I also became that guy who knew how to fix my coworkers issues with their computers. For various reasons, I never finished my CS degree, instead just opting for a 2yr degree.

Today, I'm solidly in the IT realm. Mainly in end user support, but I also do some more sysadmin-y stuff with the network and servers and even procurement. Still do some light web and email stuff, but it's usually more on the technical side these days. Been just over 18yrs since I first got the parttime gig. I'm now on my second stint with this group and I'm the IT Manager. In a department of one!

Tie between judge or crossing guard. Turns out I just love a good Halloween costume. I’ve worked in higher ed my entire career.

The prompt for this post is missing a fundamental bit of context for each response:

1. What class were you born in to?
2. How active was your parent(s) involvement in your college/career prep/pursuit?
3. Did you struggle to pay for education and have to work through school or did you get to focus solely on learning and social networking?