Quote:
Originally posted by lumberjim
I wonder what my life would have been like if my dad had strong armed me into computers or business management (he was a VP for unisys for a long time) Or if my mom had pressured me into teaching ( she's a speech pathologist at devereaux)?
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You would probably have rebelled. Did you ever WANT to do either of those? Looking back, do you consider yourself temperamentally suited to do them?
I have my own "woulda shoulda couldas." Although I wasn't necessarily a spectacular student (I didn't devote a lot of attention to assignments that didn't interest me), I was brilliant at math and could read almost anything. When I had a chance to come in contact with computers, I could immediately make one roll over and play dead. It was always assumed by my parents (
and by me) that I would go on and major in, then have a career in, computer science or electrical engineering, or something similarly high-tech and lucrative.
So in 11th grade I went away to the science & math school, and irony of ironies, I got hooked on music. I had played clarinet before, but this was my first experience playing real orchestral music in a good orchestra.
So to make a long story short, I did a second major in math, which I was still interested in, but I ended up majoring in clarinet and halfway through switched over to music history, with the goal of teaching college. My parents weren't particularly amused, but they got over it, especially when I ended up with a free ride & fellowship to a PhD program at Penn.
But I was out of that after 2 years for different reasons, some reflecting on me, some reflecting on the program I was in, and some reflecting on the general climate and job market in academia. I ended up with a help desk job at a college, and 12 years later I'm still doing IT support in higher ed, though in more of a managment role.
So all my alleged brilliance (which, I've learned, will, when combined with $1, get me a cup of coffee at Wawa) brings me to a point where I spend my days at work worrying about whether the PBX will melt before I can shake loose money for a new one and whether the next worm will work its way onto a student's laptop with a 2-year-old copy of Norton Antivirus and spread through my network like crazy.
And when I watch the Mars lander coverage and I see all the folks at JPL going crazy, I have to wonder if I couldn't have been there in that crowd if I had decided to go to Cal Tech and study astronomy. When I read all the high-tech news every day, I sometimes wonder why I'm consuming the news, and not generating it--why should I be the user of a digital music player, instead of the designer of one? Hell, why shouldn't I be writing papers in the physics journals that have people mumbling about a Nobel Prize?
Ridiculous... completely ridiculous and irrational, and all kinds of hubris to boot. I have no right and no rational basis to complain about where I am and how I got here. But the second thoughts never go away entirely. I have no doubt that if I were at JPL (assuming I made it to JPL, and didn't end up teaching at some out-of-the-way college), I'd be wondering whether I shouldn't have spent more time playing the clarinet.
Oh, this was supposed to be about the kids. My advice for them is to nurture whatever they're interested in, but don't allow them to specialize and ignore hte subjects they don't like (at least not too early). And let them know that they should have their dreams, and go after them, but they also can' be afraid to let go of a dream and follow a different one if they really think that's what they need to do.