When I was a kid, people (the adults) used to ask me "What do you wanna become when you grow up?".
And I'm 100% positive I'm not the only who gets asked this.
People would ask me this question.
And I would give them my answer. With great enthusiasm, no less.
Every time I get that question, the same optimism can be heard in my answer.
What was different was my answer itself.
What "I wanna become" seems to keep changing all the time.
Kids looooove blowing things wayyyy out of proportion, so my first answer was "to be an astronaut"!
Because I think space is cool (Doesn't everyone?).
But then, age and maturity caught up to me, and it was dragging me back down to Earth.
My next answer become "pilot".
Because if you can't reach for the stars, you'll just have to make due with the clouds in the sky.
Wait another year and its "artist", because drawing is easy (Hey, I was 6...) and people'll pay me for it.
How great is that!
Variations of "teaching" occupied the rest of my childhood.
Because that was all I ever was exposed to at the time: teachers.
Most times, I just alternated between "English teacher" and "Piano teacher".
Then, the idea of "teacher" just up-and-disappeared when I entered my teenage years.
Being an avid "player" of Neopets gave me some HTML coding skills, something many of my peers didn't have (unless you blog!).
And with that, my career goals at the time shifted into the IT field.
I thought "IT's the only thing I can do".
Journalism (and copywriting, in particular) was also something I've looked into, because my English was decent, but I never looked too deep into it.
So off I went, telling people I was interested in IT.
All this culminated at an Education Fair, where a lady representing a local A-levels college said to me,
"You know IT is a serious field, right? Its not about making computer games or stuff like that."
Wow. Just wow.
I was a little offended, to be honest.
My interest in all-things-computer started from Neopets.
HTML coding was fun for me.
I have never lived with the notion that IT = making games.
Yeah, that wasn't much of a culmination, was it?
Just some trivia.
I didn't really think about "my ambition" until my first trip to Perth, back in 2010.
My parents wanted me to attend UWA, so we paid the uni a visit, and managed to snag a course guide from the Future Students office.
That night, I had a look at all the various courses available.
Two things made me go "wow":
- So many courses to pick from
- So many pretty pictures
Mostly the second reason, really.
So, with computing in mind, I browsed through the entire guide and narrowed it down to two courses:
- Applied Computing
- Computer Science
"Two" seems to be the recurring theme in this post.
Anyway, Computer Science looked promising.
But I just wasn't "feeling" it.
So I kept a more open mind and the natural sciences looked interesting!
Again, because I was so sick of Pure Biology, Chemistry and Physics.
"Environmental Science? What a "noble" degree."
And that's how I ended up with Environmental Science.
Also, the person representing the Conservation Biology major in the guide was Asian.
So I guess that helped too!
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| A badly taken photo of my lab results. Tiny spots on the agar plates are actually colonies of Escherichia coli. Some plates contain ampicillin, which kills E. coli (up). Some E. coli have been genetically modified, ie: fluoresce under UV light (down, right). A simple but fun experiment for my first time in the lab! |
*Present Day*
I guess relying on my gut instinct back then worked!
I... can't really imagine myself doing a computing degree.
And I do find the topics in the natural sciences interesting.
Not only that, I do suppose I can see myself working in this field when I grow up (because 21 year olds aren't adults yet).
And I look forward to it.
Oh gosh, this post was due last week. I've procrastinated so much, which means I'm normal and doing what every uni student is doing.
Listening to All Out of Love - Glee Cast
Uni work abound,
TK
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