Daily writing prompt

When you were five, what did you want to be when you grew up?

View all responses

When I was five, I wanted to be a doctor. I think that’s because doctors seemed so different than anyone else I had encountered at that age. They had their own offices, they wore white coats, and they talked to little kids instead of over their heads.

When I was eight, I aspired to be a poet. My third-grade teacher taught an ambitious unit on poetry where we actually wrote in different forms (my diamante was less than desirable, but my limerick was pretty good). She had posted my Groundhog Day poem (free-form) on the door of the classroom. I told my mother I wanted to be a poet and she asked, “Do you like to eat? Poets don’t make enough money to eat.” That was the end of my vocational aspiration, because I did like to eat. I went back to wanting to be a doctor.

When I was ten, I saw a lot of doctors for a stubborn malady. At that point, I had had enough of doctors, and that cured me of wanting to be one. My career aspirations were on hold until I hit high school. When I was sixteen, I wanted to be a dietitian because I had lost a significant amount of weight. I was what they would call nowadays an orthorexic, someone who followed a strict diet and lost more weight than advisable. I held that aspiration until my sophomore year of college, when I started gaining the weight back and feared the organic chemistry classes I would need to take. I changed to Foods in Business, a corporate foods career.

By the end of my sophomore year, I wanted to be a professor. I didn’t know what I wanted to be a professor of, but I had a friend whose father was a professor and I wanted a lifestyle that would keep me in academia. It took me till my first semester senior year to find the answer. I took a family economics class as an elective, and I fell in love with the class. We talked a lot about why women earned less than men, and I found the discussion intriguing. After class one day, I asked the professor if grad school was a possibility. She escorted me down the hall to the department office and introduced me to the department chair. Thus, I got into graduate school in Family and Consumption Economics pretty easily.

Once I got my PhD, my jobs have been only slight detours in my field. I teach a few psychology classes, due to my many hours in Psychology along the way. I teach human services classes, which in my case are akin to what I trained in. At one point, I wanted to be a winemaker when I retired, but I now think that would be too much physical labor. Now, I want to be a writer when I retire.