Ask Again in a Year

It’s always been really hard for me to make decisions. I change my mind every fifteen minutes, and my career choice is not an exception. The first thing I ever said I wanted to be as an adult was a stay-at-home mom. I said I didn’t even want to go to school because I wanted to take care of my mother. She didn’t even need to be cared for, but she was such a good mom I wanted to take her of her anyways. This all changed the day I went to my sister’s school and fell in love with the activities and the environment.

From that day, I decided I wanted to study, and after some time, I decided I wanted to become a veterinarian. My parents used to laugh at me for this because when I was approached by big dogs I would start crying, so they used to say I should’ve stuck to the stay-at-home mom thing.

Some years later, I changed my mind: I wanted to be a pediatrician. I wanted to take care of kids that needed it. It lasted a couple years until my sister told me that for that I would need to see kids suffer (of course). That piece of information was enough for me to change my mind again.

After that, I didn’t really show interest towards any career path, which stressed me out a lot because I was the only one of my friends that didn’t know what they were doing after high school.

One day, I went to my friend’s house and saw her mom working in the leaving room. Everything she was doing looked super interesting to me. She was using computer programs to create event invitations that were so beautiful and pleasing to the eye. I loved it and I wanted to learn how to do it, so I asked her what she studied to get to where she was.

This was the first moment I heard the term “advertising” as a career choice. She told me she decided to lean more towards the event planning side but that I could also work for campaigns or products. I started researching about it and every day I liked more what I saw. Then, I took the official obligatory career test that you have to take in my country, and the first result I got was “marketing and graphic design”, so right there I knew I was in the right path.

I ended up sticking to it and I left to Madrid to study Advertising and Public Relations. During my almost three years of studying, I’ve tried many types of courses, some I like and some not that much. But I am sure that the ones I like the most are the ones related to graphic and strategic design. Those are the subjects where I feel like I’m better at and that I actually enjoy.

Now, if you ask me what my dream job is, I wouldn’t really know how to answer. I probably see myself working in an advertising agency for a while, to learn how everything works; and then I would take it from there. What I know is that I would like to find a place where I can express my creativity and get to use programs to create things pleasing to the eye, just like my friend’s mom did.

For now, I’m still learning about different aspects of the degree and getting to know different people from different cultures, which has really opened my mind to all the different things that are out there for me to try. I still have a year of bachelor’s to make up my mind. When people ask me what I want to work in when I graduate, I always answer, “ask again in a year”. When I graduate and create a LinkedIn account, maybe I’ll have a better answer.