Mommy, I want to be a market researcher when I grow up

I don’t remember what I expected my adult life would be like when I was young except that I expected to live in Boston and to have a “normal” 9-5 job. In college I thought I’d be a librarian or an academic or a researcher; jobs that built on what I did everyday. I didn’t know, really, what else to do. That’s what I was good at and I assumed that was what one did, get a job doing what you were good at. When you’re a kid, there’s a limited number of occupations you know about, let alone dream of. Why do you think there are so many future astronauts and ballerinas? We didn’t know any better that there were other jobs and that’s what we would do with our lives. It’s not like we sit young children down and say “This is Excel, you will spend most of your adult life swearing at it.” Weirdly enough, despite the importance of the ‘cel, all I learned in all of my education was how to type into the cells, no formulas, no formatting. Instead, I have a really cool job. And in it, I never use my ability to build on previous literature, or even that much drawn-out analysis. I don’t read and synthesize, I just react and interact. I would have never predicted that, even though looking back my favorite projects involved the same skills. I just didn’t know you could talk to people about their stuff for a living.