What did you want to do for a living when you were little.

I planned on becoming a San Francisco 49er football player. I told myself I would try until I was 25 years of age. I gave it a shot when I was 22 years old and started playing semi professional football in Las Vegas. My season was cut short after suffering from a fractured foot during a football game. 2 years later I started running excessively to get into shape for the local Jr college team. That excessive running actually injured my foot again and my dreams went down the drain. 4 years later I have a family and no more time for children's games and too old to be an athlete. Now I'm a crane operator. It's crazy where life takes you.

Marine Biologist. Went to Scripps Institute of Oceanography in La Jolla as a child and was hooked. My parents bought me an quality microscope and I spent hours exploring single-celled protozoans & other organisms in the local pond water. Lost interest as I grew older and discovered sports, muscle cars and girls in high school.

I wanted to be a teacher. Then I didn't and I hated teachers. Now I became a teacher. S***. Be careful what you wish for!

Inspired somewhat by Top Gun I wanted to be a military pilot. Did an assignment in early highschool that predicted your future height and it turned out (right or wrong) that I'd be far too tall to fit in the cockpit of an FA-18 that the RAAF use.

So I decided if I couldn't fly them I'd at least try and design them, so I became an aerospace avionics engineer. I turned down an opportunity to work on the 787 (which I semi-regret) and now find myself working with air navigation and messaging systems.

I sort of made it haha.

- Matt

Sent from my Galaxy Nexus using Tapatalk 2

I wanted to be....

Steam train driver was my ambition, and now I am a steam train driver at weekends as a volunteer. Flashlights become really useful when inspecting the boiler for leaks before lighting up.

Growing up during the height of the space race between the US and USSR in the late 1960s/early 1970s I wanted to be an astronaut. That dream lost its allure once we started going no further than low Earth orbit. I had heard as a kid how we would have a moon base by the 1980s, go to Mars by the 1990s, and have a Mars base by 2010. Obviously the reality was different. Once we landed on the moon, interest and funding for space exploration waned, and along with it my interest in being an astronaut. I settled for electrical engineering, but in truth none of the career paths open to me were all that exciting as exploring places where literally nobody had gone before. Even the electrical engineering never panned out. I got my degree, but never got that all important first job. I ended up repairing taxi meters for a few years, then finally just went into business for myself. Anyone who has a career they're passionate about is very lucky in my opinion. At best I'll occasionally have a semi-interesting project, but in the end the passion just isn't there. If I never had to work another day in my life I would be thrilled.

MikeSalt said:

Steam train driver was my ambition, and now I am a steam train driver at weekends as a volunteer. Flashlights become really useful when inspecting the boiler for leaks before lighting up.

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As a railway hobbyist, I can most definitely see the allure of driving a train. I personally love the high-speed stuff which exists in Europe and Japan. If we had that here 20 years ago, I might have picked that as my career.

I'm taking a huge risk by posting this, but sometimes life's not worth living if you don't take risks. I grew up in a New York City Housing Project consisting of six 14-story buildings on Gun Hill Road in the Bronx (Home of the New York Yankees, btw.) My dad was a NYC cab driver. I had three older sisters. We lived in a 3 bedroom apartment. My parents had the master bedroom, my 3 sisters shared a bedroom, and I had my own bedroom. We all shared one bathroom. My mom had to return to work to make ends meet, couldn't afford childcare for me when I was about 3 or 4, with my sisters in school, and so she'd pay the building maintenance man a few bucks to take me with him on his rounds of the building during the day. His name was Wally. (This was in 1960, keep in mind.) He was a 6'5", rail thin black gentleman. Well, black then it was normal speech to call blacks "colored." I really enjoyed watching Wally do his job, including sweeping out the building incinerator, helping him mop the floors. That ended up in my saying, when I was probably 4 or 5 years old, whenever someone would ask what I wanted to do when I grew up, I'd always reply, "I want to grow up to be a colored maintenance man." There, I said it.

That's an interesting story, MDJAK. I also grew up in a housing project (Woodside Houses in Astoria). We lived there from 1964 through 1978, before my parents bought a house in Flushing (I'm still living there now with my mom-dad died in 2006). I have my own funny story regarding one of the maintenance men. When I was about 3, the maintenance man happened to get in the elevator with mom and me. He was black (or colored in the parlance of the time). I asked my mother how come that man looks like a chocolate Easter bunny. Remember at the time black people didn't have much exposure in the media, and a very young child like myself in a mostly white housing project who hadn't yet started school may not have even been aware that other races existed. It was a totally innocent question, and the man even smiled when he heard it. My mom then later explained how there are different races. IIRC she was good friends with one of the black woman in another apartment at the time, but I don't recall this woman coming to our apartment until I was about 4. By then I had started noticing different types of people, so she was just another person.

@MDJAK interesting story. Thanks for sharing. It's amazing how simple things in life can have a huge impact on children.

My dad always seemed to know how to fix everything when I was a kid, and I thought that was really cool. Since he is an electrical engineer I wanted to become one too, so that's what I did. I definitely don't have any regrets about the career choice, and there are always interesting things to work on. Sometimes I wish I got to work outdoors more often and/or in the dark with flashlights though!

@MDJAK.. very amusing, and pleasantly innocent.

Sorta reminds me of the movie "The Jerk", with Steve Martin. In the movie, he is raised by a poor sharecropper family, and I believe he starts the movie narration with the phrase "I was born a poor black child". I thought the movie was great, especially in regards to his character's own career plans, and his search for his "special purpose".

anyway... I didn't really have a specific career goal, other than wanting to do something technical. I ended up spending a tour in the Marine Corps fixing avionics, which got me interested in electronics and went to get a EE degree. That got me a job actually designing avionics and spacecraft electronics, which was pretty interesting. Then Russia (edit: Soviet Union) collapsed and a lot of aerospace budget was lost, so now I'm doing electronics for earthmoving equipment. Not quite as glamorous but still interesting, and the industry is much more stable than aerospace.

The kindergarten teacher asked us all that question. I thought I'd like to be a teacher, but many others said that before it was my turn, so I had to one-up them and say I wanted to be a college professor. Well, they called me "perfessor" from then on.

Other things I wanted to be during the course of growing up: a fuel delivery man, a truck driver, a scuba diver. In my senior year of high school I decided on optometry, but couldn't make good college grades in the sciences. Ended up with a business degree and then a law degree... but never passed the bar exam.

My dad was a salesman and got me started in sales, but I wasn't very good at it.

For the last 20 years I've had a small 'franchise' type business, display marketing of books and gift items in schools and delivering the orders on a route system. I find that I like being outdoors much of the day and being my own boss. Whew, glad I found a niche that I'm passably good at!

MDJAK said:

....... when I was probably 4 or 5 years old, whenever someone would ask what I wanted to do when I grew up, I'd always reply, "I want to grow up to be a colored maintenance man."

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How'd that work-out for you?

Seriously, give us the Paul Harvey,, The rest of the story.

~ Chance

trash collector. i thought i'd only have to work one day a week.

I wanted to be a race car driver. Unfortunately I have incredibly poor eyesight and spectacularly average reflexes.

I'm still trying to figure out what I want to be when I grow up I designed fire alarm systems for 6 years or so and then was a PM in the same industry for about 8 years. Quit a couple months ago because of complete burnout. Have been "working" as a general floater/whatever needs to be done guy at my friend's auto repair shop since but the "pay" is shite... thinking maybe dealership service advisor? gotta start pounding the pavement...

Mattaus said:

Inspired somewhat by Top Gun I wanted to be a military pilot. Did an assignment in early highschool that predicted your future height and it turned out (right or wrong) that I'd be far too tall to fit in the cockpit of an FA-18 that the RAAF use.

So I decided if I couldn't fly them I'd at least try and design them, so I became an aerospace avionics engineer. I turned down an opportunity to work on the 787 (which I semi-regret) and now find myself working with air navigation and messaging systems.

I sort of made it haha.

- Matt

Sent from my Galaxy Nexus using Tapatalk 2

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Im too tall too !

I wanted to be a pilot, and did a specialist aviation course at high school, but in year 10 started growing almost an inch a week and by yr 11 was to tall for the RAAF, also my grades in maths weren't too good, so I changed maths classes, dropped the aviation course and did photography instead - I was then hooked, and wanted to be a photographer.
Took me a year of study, a few years of working as a security guard (which explains my love of lights), buying a digital SLR and learning everything I could, a year of photographing school photos, a year of working as a camera tech, and finally, I am now working my Dream Job, a photojournalist for a newspaper.
I really love my job, good hours, good pay, meeting interesting people

I wanted to be an electronics engineer. I stopped short with a two year EET degree. I remember one job interview. I was going to repair VCRs (this was the mid 80s). Pay was $4 per hour. I had made more doing odd jobs through a temp service including mowing lawns for a contractor's new homes before they were sold.

In 1989, right after graduation, I landed a job in the IT department of local company. It wasn't electronics and I had to learn a lot initially. I eventually worked my way into managing the department. I was there for 18 years and feel I was an asset to the company, but I started to feel out of place and burned out. I started a small fabrication business on the side. I eventually quit the IT job.

And then the economy went south. Anyone who's gone into business for themselves probably knows the first couple years can be a struggle. In the third year, the economy turns sour. When your self employed, you can't file for unemployment and there are no jobs to hire me either. I decided to stick it out. Four years later, I'm doing better. I won't ever be rich doing what I do, but it is just how things have panned out in life.

I wanted to be a NYC transit motorman/driver. Always had a fascination with the lead car and watching the tunnel go by. Fast foward 20 years and I found myself in the transit system, not a motorman but as a police officer.