How My Education Affected My Career Choice by Etame

How My Education Affected My Career Choice by Etame - June 2017 Scholarship Essay

Children have always aspired to do a varying range of occupations as soon as they grow up. Some wish to be something that promises high success like a doctor, president, or superstar. Others desire to opt for a job that is more heroic such as a police officer or firefighter. Some even want to be something more outlandish like a dragon or dinosaur. I, on the other hand, wanted to be a daycare provider. As I have grown older, however, my job interests have changed. Further progressing through my academic career has allowed me to discover many different professions that I would enjoy much more than being a daycare provider.
Elementary school was the time I began learning about the various career choices the world had in store other than just being a daycare provider. Once in a while, my class would have a day where we could bring our parents to school and have them tell the class what they do for a living. A handful were doctors, others worked for restaurants, and some even owned a small business. Some of these parents left a mark on me as I was amazed by what some of them did for a living. I aspired to do the jobs they did. During my years in elementary school, we also learned the importance of money (or at least get introduced to it). We learned how it is important to save money and also gain as much as you can. As a result, I wanted a job that made a lot of money.
When I entered middle school, I was able to narrow down my career interests to three jobs: a doctor, a dentist, or an engineer. During these three years, my interests in the subjects learned in school began to vary more extremely. For instance, my feelings towards English were, if I could sum it up in one word, “meh.” I did not hate the class, but I also did not love it. My opinions on history, on the other hand, were much more negative as I felt the class was boring and its need for memorization was too much of a challenge for me, so I knew not to do anything in the future that was related to that subject. The subject I liked the most was math. It was straight-forward and quite easy once you knew how to solve the problem. This made me want to have a job that was math-oriented. One thing in middle school that struck me tremendously was an event called “Hour of Code.” Its purpose was to introduce students to programming and allow them to mess with it for an hour using a website called HourofCode. At the time, I had heard of programming, but I was not sure whether I would be interested in it or not. This all changed, however. Once I compiled my first program, an explosion of joy erupted inside of me, obliterating any of my past career interests and replacing it with coding and anything related to computers. Now, I knew exactly what I wanted to be as soon as I grew up.
High school was when I obtained a much deeper understanding of the life of a software engineer, my new career interest. During ninth grade, I took a business class called CABAM. One important assignment we did that expanded my knowledge of my future career choice was shadowing a business of our choice. To me, this was very exciting as I could observe the average work day of a software engineer. During my time there, I saw (and learned) how the website for the business was made, the business’s software, and also how the bugs in the software/website were caught and fixed. All of this furthered my interest in being a software engineer. Since I knew what I wanted to be, I also did some self-learning on computer programming languages such as C# and HTML. Learning and coding these languages brought me absolute joy (especially when the code actually worked). I was definitely certain on what I wanted to be once I joined the working world.
Education was a major factor on what I wanted to be once I grew up. It made me know there were a plethora of jobs out there than just the ones I knew. It even gave me a more in-depth perception on the careers I wanted to be in. Without education, one would have a much harder time figuring out what they would want to be when they grow up. It is very important that people get a proper education so they too know what job they want before it is too late.