I was one of those children who grew up no knowing what career path they wanted to take. One of those ones who didn't have a dream job . At different times in my life, I chose different careers.
I remember I started-of wanting to be a pilot, I think I was about the age of eight at the time. Some older friends told me that pilots die easily, they talked about plane crashes and how it was impossible to survive one. I became afraid and after a while I decided I didn't want to be a pilot anymore.
Next thing that came to my mind was law. It became my new dream job. This was when I was about ten. I had seen them in a few movies and they looked quite unique plus they always talked with ambiguous words. Whenever I was asked what I wanted to be, I'd say a lawyer, this continued until one day when I told another friend of mine. This guy was sort of our click leader at the time, he was stronger and a bit smarter than all of us. When I told him that I wanted to be a lawyer, he immediately asked me if I wanted to die, he said lawyers are easily murdered especially when they take up important and controversial cases, those cases that involved top politicians, drug lords and militant leaders .
He said whenever they thought that their cases were going bad and they may stood a chance of losing, that they would attack the opposing lawyers.
This greatly frightened me at the time because a lot of crime and murders were happening in my state at the time , and I somehow began to think that a lot of people who were murdered would be lawyers who were against these bigwigs in the society. I also had to drop this choice of a career because I didn't want to die.
I think the next thing I chose was to be an electrical/electronics engineer. This wasn't my choosing anyway, it was my friend's mum who said I was going make a good electronics engineer. She said it after I helped my friend which happened to be her daughter, fix her video game.
It was this very small portable video game that had the block game ( Tetris) and many other games. It runs on battery. It was the size of our phones and could be carried about. One day, as she was running in the compound, the game fell from her hand and hit the ground, then the batteries pulled off from the battery chamber.
Other children tried to fix it but they couldn't, the battery slots had widened and so the batteries could no longer fit in well.
When I saw what had happened, I remembered how my elder brothers had handled a similar issue when our television remote fell. I simply cut a little piece of Zinc and braced the battery at the end so it would be tighter. When I turned on the video game and it came on, everyone was so happy. She took the game and showed it to her mum. Her mum was happy too. They had almost given up on the whole thing. This was when and how she called me and electrical engineer.
I took the title for a while but deep down my heart, I didn't really like electrical engineers. Because of how adventurous I was when I was little, I had gotten electrocuted severally and it made me dread anything that had to do with electricity, Plus the so called electricians in my area weren't looking so good, They looked really poor and this made me not want to associate myself with anything that had to do with electric works. I didn't know that there was more to the job than fixing lights and switches like the electricians in my neighborhood. I also let go of this career ambition and moved on to something else.
The next was petroleum Engineering. This was almost every young boys dream in my state. My state was rich in mineral resources and infact most of the countries revenue was gotten from the state of residence. My state was host to a lot of multi-national petroleum companies and so there were quite a lot of jobs from the petroleum sector. These petroleum companies were the richest. Their staffs were paid heavily and they formed the bulk of the rich people in the state.
Myself and most of my friends wanted to be petroleum engineers. It became my new dream job at age 12 till after some years when I got into senior secondary school.
In senior secondary school, I had a change of heart. I no longer liked the petroleum the engineering career. I knew I had chosen it because of the hype and was no longer interested, plus I felt it had a lot to do with chemistry and I didn't like chemistry so much.
Towards the end of my secondary school career, I became really worried and restless. I couldn't tell my dream job. I was just confused. I thought so much and at some point towards the end of my secondary education, I began admiring lawyers again. I liked the prestige they had. I thought of being a lawyer but I was in the science class and couldn't start everything all over.
I thought of so many jobs and I realized that engineering was my best fit. There was several engineering disciplines to choose from and after so much thought and analysis I came to the realise that civil engineering was one that I would fit-in the most. I adopted it and since then started seeing myself as one. Building and construction became my dream job.
Although I first got admitted to study industrial chemistry, I couldn't settle for it because I had now known what wanted I and couldn't settle for less. I applied again and was admitted to study civil engineering in one of the most prestigious universities in my country, Nigeria.
It was really a tough and rugged journey but I'm happy that I finally found myself doing a job I chose, my dream Job.
Thanks for reading. I hope you enjoyed this.