If childhood career dreams were résumés, mine would have been written in glitter pens, stapled with stickers, and sent straight to NASA, Hollywood, and Hogwarts. At five, I was ready to be a doctor who also sang pop songs on weekends and occasionally solved mysteries with Scooby-Doo. At ten, I narrowed it down to astronaut, fashion designer, or professional ice-cream taster. Basically, my childhood career goals looked less like a five-year plan and more like a chaotic shopping cart on Amazon, half serious, half ridiculous, and mostly unrealistic.
My childhood ambitions weren’t about logic; it was about the sparkle. As kids, we believe jobs are costumes you can just put on. One day you can be a firefighter, the next you’re a ballerina, and by Friday you can even be both and extinguish fires in a pretty pink tutu. Every profession feels achievable when your biggest deadline was to finish your homework before Chhota Bheem comes on TV. And the best part? Nobody questions it. Tell an adult you want to be a magician president, and they nod supportively, as if it’s a genuine career trajectory and not a future LinkedIn headline that reads: Open to Work: Wizard, specializing in Rabbit-Out-of-a-Hat Methods.
By high school, though, the glitter had faded, replaced by textbooks, entrance exams, and the tragic realization that everything requires math. Becoming a doctor no longer seemed glamorous once I realized it meant memorizing entire textbooks thicker than the Harry Potter series. This is the era when you learn the ugly truth: every cool job requires skills you don’t necessarily like. Want to be a vet? Hope you’re fine with seeing sad puppies. Want to be an architect? Say hello to calculus. Want to be a YouTuber? Be prepared to spend six hours editing a 10-minute video. Then there’s also the parental pressure. Parents dropping gentle hints like “engineering is stable,” and “medicine is respectable,” while your inner child screams, ‘But what about my bakery-slash-bookstore idea?!’
And then came college, the great sorting hat of life. Except instead of Gryffindor or Slytherin, you’re sorted into Economics, Psychology, English, or, if you’re really brave, The Sciences. Picking a major feels like scrolling through Netflix: there are too many options, some you’ve never heard of, and a few that look exciting until you press play and realize it’s four seasons of pure suffering. But when you finally land on the one that clicks, it feels… right. After years of dreaming about everything from astronaut to ice-cream critic, my current major, business, feels like something I actually enjoy, not something I’m pretending to enjoy for the aesthetic (Though I do love the Pinterest results for female CEO core). Childhood me might be shocked that I chose boardrooms and spreadsheets over living on the moon or winning a Grammy, but college me is just happy I picked something that doesn’t make me cry over assignments (most of the time).
Looking back, my childhood dream jobs weren’t something I couldn’t achieve, but rather they were rehearsals. Trying on roles like “doctor,” “singer,” or “zookeeper” was just a way of figuring out what sparked excitement. Sure, I didn’t become a popstar-detective, but the journey taught me what I didn’t want. And that’s just as important as what I do want. My career didn’t follow the glitter-crayon plan I drew up in third grade. Instead, it was messy, unexpected, and sometimes hilariously off-script. And while it made me question my existence, it turned out to be okay, or maybe even better than okay. So while childhood me dreamed in glitter pens, the college me continues to dream in Google Docs. The tools may have changed, but the ambition? That’s still the same and just sharper, smarter, and (thankfully) LinkedIn-approved.