"A Dream Job" by Jordan N.

 

Throughout our lives we are asked this question, “What do you want to be when you grow up?” Although it sounds so simple, there are millions of possible answers that differ in responses to those you ask. If you were to ask a kid, you would get very interesting answers ranging from a doctor, actor, dancer, musician, or even the first person to explore a new planet. However as kids, we didn’t really understand what jobs were. We only saw the glorified version of popular jobs and automatically assumed that they were these cool professions that looked fun. As we grow older and began to learn a bit more about how life really works, our mindset changes and many of us often abandon our pursuit of our childhood dream jobs to finding a job to simply get by.

 

When we are older, many of us usually forget about those childhood dream jobs to pursue a “realistic” career path. There are many things in life that greatly influence our decision in what line of work we end up pursuing. Pressure from family members is usually the main factor that effects many young people today. We often rely on the support of our family when choosing our future career. When we expect approval and enthusiasm from our parents but are met with criticism and doubt, it sends us into a state of constant paranoia of being a failure. The fear of failing and not being able to make enough money to help ourselves or even our family is also another reason to what drives people away from pursuing their dreams. This fear of the unknown has stopped many people and could possibly do the same for me.

 

As a senior in high school, its kind of intimidating to think about the future and what actions I am taking right now to influence it. Already it feels like I have went through every stage of trying to figure out what I want to do. I have been to multiple college workshops, took quizzes about my personality to figure out what I would be good in, took different classes to see what interests I had that I would be willing to pursue in the future, visited colleges and

researched majors, and yet after all of that I still felt lost. Constantly juggling around different careers that I thought could work out for me to later on forget about became a recurring task. Asking family members on what to do seemed like the right thing until I realized how most of them had the same jobs and are very judgemental of people in our family who choose to do something different from what they think is good. Seeing friends and other people around me seeming to have everything figured out with what college they want to go to, what major they plan to take, and the job they plan to get in also did not help my constant fear of the future. So when the time came for when I had to share what my actual plan was to my family, it was met with mixed emotions but together they all shared this slight hesitation of what they thought about it. My decision to attempt to pursue a career that closely aligned with my interests was met with this type of reaction due to how different it was from what other people in my family are doing. Since it was so different, they did not know how well it paid and its stability compared to theirs which seemed to be their way of determining someone’s success in that job. Despite that they all still said that they would support my choices. Yet I can still tell that they were not too happy with it based off the tone of their voices when they said it, which immediately set off an alarm inside that said I was making a mistake. This whole event soon led to weeks of constant worrying if what I plan to do is good for me. Thoughts of different things going wrong along the way filled my head and constantly tried to persuade me to take the safe route of finding job stability rather than being happy in a career of my choice. Even with all of these fears of things not going according to plan, I have come to the realization that it would be much more preferable to make an attempt with my “dream” job than get stuck somewhere I have no interest at all and slowly grow to hate it day by day.