What Do You Want To Be When You Grow Up? by Rita

What Do You Want To Be When You Grow Up? by Rita - June 2021 Scholarship Essay

What do you want to be when you grow up? For many people, they know the answer to that from a very young age. They see a beacon guiding them through the light to their final destination along their career path. For others like me, it can take decades to answer that age-old question. I am 46-year-old, married woman, mother of three who is just now beginning to see that glimmer of recognition as to what my future will be. While I have been on a career path, it wasn’t really clear for me until recently what that path would be.

I have worked in the medical field for the past 24 years, all for the same organization. When I first started my career, it was in an entry level position as a nutrition assistant where I learned how to help patients with their dietary needs based on their medical diagnoses and treatment plan. It was a great job for a young woman with only a high school diploma, and I thoroughly enjoyed it. After 4.5 years in the position, however, I started to feel restless, no longer feeling challenged and wondered what other options I had. I looked to my first teacher for guidance, my mother. At the age of 38, my mother, a single woman raising two daughters on her own, went to college and obtained her Medical Secretary degree. She worked full-time during the day and went to school in the evenings. She was exhausted but never lost her footing; or if she did, she never showed it. She was and is a warrior in my eyes, always pushing herself to learn more and to share her knowledge with others. She taught me that people should not put limits on their education, that they should value their self-worth and nourish their potential. Never stop learning. So, like my mother, I followed in her footsteps and went back to school at the age of 27 and got my Medical Secretary Certificate. I thrived and enjoyed the process and graduated the program with a 4.0 GPA; and the icing on the cake, I landed the first job that I interviewed for and was hired on as a medical secretary in the Department of Psychiatry and Psychology where I remained for the next 10 years of my career.

Throughout the next decade, I continued to take educational classes provided by my organization and worked in several other positions, all the while continuing to learn more skill sets. However, I was still unclear as to what my career path was; and after 22 years with the organization, I lost myself. In fact, if someone were to ask me what I wanted to be when I was little or what I wanted to do in the future, I didn’t have an answer for them. I was just fine doing what I was doing and had no plans of changing that. I had become complacent, doing the same thing day after day with no drive or motivation to do more. I had lost my sense of purpose, my sense of who I was. I no longer felt challenged at work and began to dread the self-evaluation portion of my yearly review that asked me to list three goals for the upcoming year. I didn’t have any goals and I felt resentful for having to come up with three more bogus goals year after year. I didn’t see the point. I didn’t see that I had hit a brick wall and was stuck.

It wasn’t until my mother approached me one day, asking me if I was okay that I began to wake up. She recognized before I did that I wasn’t happy. She asked me what had changed and what she could do to help. I didn’t have an answer for her. I was fine. I did what was asked of me every day – I took care of my family, had a steady job and a steady income, what more was there to say? Wasn’t that enough? I was content, or at least I thought I was. What I didn’t realize was that I was mistaking contentment with complacency. She asked me the hard questions. Do I really want to continue doing the same job for the next 20 years? She helped me realize that people need to continue to challenge themselves throughout life in order to fill fulfilled. That challenge can be physical, intellectual, spiritual, or educational. We need to jump out of our comfort zone sometimes in order to continue to grow. My mother encouraged me to reach out to my community, my portfolio of friends and colleagues that I had built over the past 20+ years. Seek a mentor, ask for guidance. Consider going back to school. After many tears and some true self-reflection, I did just that. I began to realize that I enjoy learning and want to share that knowledge with others. I want to be a mentor to others like me. I want to help others who start off a little lost, unsure of what they want to do in the future.

So, you ask me who my most influential teacher is and why? The answer is my mother. She has been my strongest advocate from day one and always will be my most valued teacher. She taught me to advocate for myself.