When I first formed the idea of being a grown up professional, it was around the idea of broadcast journalism. And I fixated at the ripe old age of 12 on Jessica Savitch. Not Barbara Walters. Not Diane Sawyer. Not even Jane Pauley or any of the other morning ladies. The funny thing is, I don't even remember ever watching Jessica do the news, to be honest, but from somewhere I got the idea that she was a pretty cool cat. (Like my early '80s lingo?)
When I think about the idea of being in front of a camera every night, I have to laugh. There's really not much that appeals LESS to me than that. I am legendarily awkward when a video camera is turned on me, and I know it. Luckily I reached this awareness by the time I entered college and somehow settled on the very practical mass communications degree, with a concentration in journalism and an art minor. Somewhere between 12 and 17 I arrived at the idea of the written word being far more appealing to me than the spoken-in-front-of-a-camera word.
During college, I thought about changing my major a few times--actually did once, but quickly changed it back--and focusing more on literature and creative writing than journalism. But, in the end, I'm not sure how much of a difference it would have made to what I've actually done with my degree in the (cough, sputter) 25 years since acquiring it.
My trajectory looks somewhat like this:
Copy editor
Production coordinator
Managing editor
Director of production
Caterer and personal chef
Stay-at-home mom/wife
Projects (part-time)
Director of web services
Not much Jessica Savitch glamour in that resume. But, I am a-ok with that.
An interesting, but not unusual, side note is that when I started my career post-college, the idea that I'd currently be working primarily online and with websites would never have occurred to me. Well, it couldn't have occurred to me, as the world wide web wasn't yet world wide. Amazing what the past 20 years have brought.
If I were to do the college thing all over again, I would focus more on business, organizational leadership, marketing and a bit of design. In my college days, the business students all seemed quite stuffy and obviously headed for a lifetime of accounting and I avoided that department as much as possible. Not sure why my perception was so strong in that arena, given that I grew up in a household where the idea of business and entrepreneurial spirit was respected; I think now that I just didn't correlate the business concepts I knew with the academic side of it. I feel very lucky to have learned a great deal about business by being part of a great company and also by having a desire to learn more and read and study as I go.
I ran across this little tidbit while looking for a nice picture of Jessica online. It made me laugh. Seeing that I think, "Oh, I could have done that job! It's really just about bossing people around." Ha.
What did you want to be when you grew up? Did you make your dreams a reality, or did your dreams change along the way?
Jen and I (and occasionally my mom and Lisa too!) are blog challenging throughout September. You can catch her blog over at Stuff Jen Says. If you want to write along with us, give me a shout and I'll send you the blog prompts.
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