What I wanted to be :
> When I was very young, a ballerina or a princess
> Up until age 10 a teacher . . . until I encountered a particularly poor example of teaching which kind of put me off it.
> At 11, I found a love of languages and wanted to be a translator and travel Europe. That went out the window when I spent a few months in Germany when I was 16 and realised that our learning of European languages just couldn't compete with their grasp of English.
> Then I settled on a career in psychology. I studied it up to A-Level and even went so far as to sit undergraduate entrance exams but deferred for a year to work and save up and fund myself through uni.
In the end though, during that year I blagged my way onto a graduate recruitment programme at a merchant bank off the back of my A-Levels and decided I liked the pay too much to give it all up and go back into full time education. (plus by that time I'd invested in property so had other financial commitments)
What I've actually done is varied and some of it has been pretty exciting, but bears little resemblance to any of the above :
> While at school / 6th form college - paper rounds and various Saturday / part-time jobs including working as a florist, promoting LEGO for Woolworths and a holiday job assisting in a surveyors' office.
> After deferring uni, I worked on the futures and foreign exchange desks in the merchant banking sector until the whole Nick Leeson fiasco shook up that sector and led to a load of mergers and redundancies.
> That was followed by a period of temping and short term roles while I studied evenings and weekends to qualify as a chartered accountant.
> Then a lengthy period working as an accountant for various organisations
> And now while I'm still an accountant, I actually work as a project manager for a media company (technical implementations and financial management) and run my own photography business.
At 38 retirement's still a long way off, so who knows what else I'll get to do