Wet Cleanup on Aisle 5

So what made you decide to go back to school?

The fictional Zeke

This post is for all you potential non-traditional vet students out there, those of you who are NOT able to say, “I’ve known since I was a little tyke that I wanted to be a veterinarian. The first time I laid eyes on my puppy Zeke, who was to be my friend and companion for the next 14 years, I just knew.” Or something like that. That definitely isn’t me!

Truth be told, by the time I graduated high school I hadn’t given much thought to what I wanted to be when I grew up, since all that time I’d been assuming I would grow up to be a housewife with 1.6 children. What can I say? It was the Bible Belt in the 80s.

I suddenly found myself zipping through potential career ideas – music therapist! no, wait – doctor! no, um – geologist! how ’bout teacher? um…

I graduated with a geology degree, and ended up teaching high school for a bit while I worked for the National Park Service as a park ranger during the summer. I gave nature walks and talks, campfire programs, and the like. The park ranger gig was a good one for me, and when the chance to work year-round as a park ranger came, I took it.

Bummer is that working full time for the government is a lot less fun than working as a “seasonal.” There’s way more paperwork and way less interaction with the public. The more I started dealing with bureaucratic nonsense, the more I started to think, “How did I get here? This is not my beautiful house…”

About that time a computer job opened up in the park where I was working. It paid almost twice as much money, and, since I was desperate for a change, I signed up. (I have a programming background, and one of the courses I taught in high school was computer science, so it wasn’t a total leap.)

Computers were pretty good to me. I liked the problem solving aspect a lot. After 9/11, though, computers in the government got to be way less fun, and I was dealing with even more bureaucratic nonsense.  I had to make my escape.

Now, I realize that in almost every job out there, people have to deal with bureaucratic nonsense. So it wasn’t the bureaucratic nonsense alone that made me look for a different path, it was that coupled with the fact that I had a nagging feeling I wasn’t doing what I was meant to do. But I didn’t know what I was meant to do, so I just kept doing what I was doing.

Somewhere in there I turned 30, and that was a bit of a freak-out point. The age didn’t bother me, but the fact that I didn’t know what I wanted to do with my life, and the clock was ticking, DID bother me. I spent my 30th birthday at a hot springs/spa writing down all the things I enjoyed and all the careers I could possibly see myself doing.  I’m not sure veterinarian was even on the list.  It was a good exercise, though, in that it really got me thinking about what makes me tick, and what makes me happy.  I definitely had an idea that working with animals in some capacity would be really fabulous.

I quit the Park Service gig and spent a year being miserable at the local paper, a year of misery which had a wonderful upside: I was so miserable that I jumped at the chance to work for my local vet, even though the salary was minuscule compared to what I’d made working for the Park Service.  I don’t think I could ever have made the jump straight from one to the other, but the year of misery in between helped bridge the gap.

Working at the vet was, and is, fantastic.  Still, it took me about a year there before I was convinced that I wanted to take the plunge.  There’s just so much mental chatter that convinces one NOT to go and do something silly like go back to school, particularly when one has a mortgage and all, but over the course of that year, I had mostly come to terms with all my excuses.

Now that I’m back in school and loving it, I wonder why I didn’t do it sooner!

In our next episode, we examine those excuses…

Meanwhile, your homework assignment is to peruse any of the following fab books that helped me focus my intentions:

What Should I Do With My Life? by Po Bronson–It probably won’t guide you much in answering this question for yourself, but it does contain a lot of inspiring stories of people who’ve changed it up successfully.

I Could Do Anything If I Only Knew What It Was by Barbara Sher–Full of helpful exercises to aid you in defining what makes you tick.  She has several titles in this vein.

Taming Your Gremlin by Rick Carson–how to tell that negative voice in your head what’s what.

Go to the library and start reading career and self-help books.  You don’t need to read them cover to cover, just take what you need and go…