What Would Your Dream Job Be?

My dream job growing up was always to be an art teacher or a history teacher. I have liked drawing since I was a child, so I always thought I would grow up to go to art school and pursue it in some type of career. Actually, when I was small, my dream was to write and illustrate children’s books because that was the type of art I loved. I spent a lot of time looking at books as well as writing and illustrating my own using my sketchbooks. As I grew up, I started becoming interested in the great artists and in classical art such as Van Gogh, Francisco de la Goya, and Salvador Dali. I no longer wanted to write children’s books, but I was still interested in art and in teaching it someday because I wanted to share my love for the subject with other people. I also spent a lot of time in class doing sketches on my homework. Over time, I gained a reputation amongst my classmates and my teachers as being artistically gifted even though I personally didn’t think so. Either way, if you had asked me what I wanted to be as a high school freshman, I would have undoubtedly said I wanted to be an art teacher. It was one of my two main choices.

My other choice was wanting to be a history teacher. Almost as much as I loved art, I loved history. It fascinated me and I was good friends with all my history teachers. I loved to read any book where I could study it and I loved discussing it and the impacts I thought it had on the world today. In my history classes, I was always the top student and the most vocal participant in class discussions. Being named as the top history student was always my biggest pride. Of course, my favorite projects were any that involved art or where we could incorporate art. Back then, I wouldn’t have been able to answer you if I wanted to be an art teacher or a history teacher more.

Coming into the present day, we can see I became neither. This was because I was regrettably talked out of both. As soon as I was a high school senior, my academic counselors started telling me pursuing a career in either was not a safe choice. In college, the advice against it only grew stronger and my counselors told me that going into either field was risky because neither offered many career choices and the career choices that were available were not safe because of the economy at the time. If I was going to go to college and take out a student loan, I knew the smart choice to do was to invest in a secure career, so I decided I should listen to the advice of my counselors and study something with stable career opportunities and so I decided to major in elementary school education instead of focusing on either history or art.

Looking back at my decision now, I can’t help but feel a little bit of sadness that I could not pursue a career in the fields I loved the most. I still have a great interest in both subjects, and they still make up a large part of my hobbies, but it would have been my dream to be able to work in them. Sometimes the regret is so great, I tell myself I will definitely go back to college when I return back home to America and study them so that I can make my dream come true. My drawing abilities, however, have gone down since I stopped practicing in high school, and I feel I am behind my peers. It might take a while for me to catch up and become a good artist, so personally if I had to choose just one of the fields right now, I would probably go back to history.

Dolores

Vocabulary
pursue (verb) – to do something or try to achieve something over a period of time
illustrate (verb) – to use pictures, photographs, diagrams, etc. in a book, etc.
gifted (adjective) – being naturally talented or skilled at something
incorporate (verb) – to include or contain