College is such a lovely cloistered world compared to the reality that comes after graduation. Childhood interests develop into pathways that lead to our choice of a college major. Sometimes the choice is job-worthy and sometimes not so much. But the four years it takes to obtain most undergraduate degrees is also four years that most students use to figure out how to live on their own and slowly start managing their own lives. Perhaps that is the greater lesson.
At five years old, all little kids know what they want to be when they grow up. At that age I was constantly weighing the choices of becoming a nurse or a ballerina. But I also loved to do art, so it became my major in college and in a somewhat random way led me to advertising and marketing which pays the bills. I had plenty of opportunities to be a nurse while raising two boys and as a twenty-seven year veteran of Jazzercise, I’ve kept keep the dancer in me happy.
Henry wanted to travel and see the world. He was a prime candidate for a career in the Navy. He went to the Uncollege (his term for the Naval Academy) and then embarked on a twenty-year career of seeing all seven continents, and a good bit of the four oceans as well.
Through childhood (and still today), Calvin loved games. He loved to play them, create them, make them and once he got into computers, he loved video games. He wanted to be a game developer, and then software programmer. No surprise he’s working for Microsoft now.
As a child, Corey loved animals, especially dogs, and sometimes he said he wanted to be a dog trainer, but I think Corey just mostly wanted to be Corey—expressive, determined, creative and strong-willed. He is the child my mother wished on me. I can see a lot of myself in him. As a kinetic imaging major, he has a gift for capturing just the right emotion with his video imagery and sound. I’m always eager to see what’s next.
Henry’s oldest daughter, Angela, will graduate from college at the end of December. She’s had two interests throughout college: theater and language. She’s majoring in linguistics and studied abroad a semester in France, but her summer internships have all revolved around wardrobe and costuming for the theater. Now faced with her future, she’s considering the Navy as a launching pad to a career in cryptology, but already has a job lined up with the Richmond ballet. Stay tuned.
Kimberly, Henry’s youngest daughter, loves action, adventure, the outdoors and maybe Greg. She’s an outdoor recreation major and met Greg at a camp in Vermont where she worked this past summer. This young woman has no fear: she’s a rock-climbing, trapeze-swinging, bungee-jumping diva. Next year, she’s excited to be heading to South Africa, location of the “highest bungee-jump in the world” for fall semester of her senior year, We still don’t know what she’ll be studying.
It’s fun to listen to and watch our young adult children prepare for the real world. Who knows where life is really going to take them? However we start out, it’s not always where we end up. Sometimes, it’s impossible to know what you really want to do until you grow up a bit. I think the idea is to have few regrets when you look back. And while no job is perfect, I think it’s important to enjoy your job and feel like your contributions are making a difference. Now that I’m in my 50’s I think I would have been good at a lot of different things that didn't interest me at all at age eighteen, but that’s only because I’m older and know more about myself than I did in college. However, I still love art and work as an artist now in my spare time. I’ll never own toe shoes but sometimes things do come full circle.
