Column:

From fashion design to psychiatry, Daniels explores options

By Gwen Daniels

Published Oct. 13, 2008

I don't know what I want to be when I grow up.

In second grade, I wanted to be a fashion designer. I taped my best designs, including bacon-print leggings and a matching oversized T-shirt adorned with sequined bacon and eggs sunny-side-up, to the refrigerator door.

Later, when an army bomb technician spoke to my sixth grade class, I decided I would follow her footsteps. After all, I enjoyed baking peanut butter cookies and riding my scooter. Dismantling live ammo was right up my alley.

The next year, I wanted to write a soap opera. I practiced for my future by writing scripts for "Troubled Waters," the show my friends and I planned to film at the neighborhood lake. I would also star in "Troubled Waters" as Mitzi Barnum-Bailey, who at age 16 ran away to and later inherited the circus.

After I read "Gifted Hands," the triumphant memoir by world-renowned neurosurgeon Ben Carson, I wanted to be a doctor who separates conjoined twins. I've also planned to be an obstetrician, a pediatric psychiatrist, a teacher and an advertising executive. (I didn't want to work my way up to the top, I told my mother. I just wanted to be an executive, and I wanted my firm's logo to be the rising sun.)

But now, when it matters, I don't know what I want to be when I grow up.

I have ideas.

Since I'm in the journalism school, I could study magazine journalism, become Andrea Sachs or a not-quite-Prada-clad writer at a magazine less cutthroat. 

Or I could focus on strategic communications, the more appealing alternative at the moment. I think I would enjoy public relations: marketing, fundraising, education, outreach and writing, lots of writing. My friend Megan and her dad introduced me to investor relations, public relations for the financial sector.

My parents suggested arts administration, a promising option, at least for someone who enjoys the business side of the fine arts and classical music. (Me! For my eighteenth birthday, I brought my friends to the opera.) 

My friend Kendall and I have discussed, only half-jokingly, opening a bakery in New York City. Bittersweet, we'd call it.

I have ideas, but I don't know.

I like to know.

I like lists, schedules and planning ahead. Proof: I use my agenda book, my iCal and those electronic sticky notes on my MacBook dashboard.

I like knowing exactly what I'm doing and when. ("Let's grab dinner this weekend" doesn't cut it. I need a time, date and place, thank you very much. What's winging it?) 

I want my life to go the way I've planned it. And, of course, I'm planning! I've made a PowerPoint for the insert-a-groom wedding I've already planned; one day when I was really bored, I even wrote grocery lists for the weekly dinner menus I've created for my future family.

You can make fun of me now, but I'll be laughing when you forget to buy tilapia for the Cerveza-battered fish tacos you're making.

Most of all, I feel like a failure. I want to be the girl with a plan, the girl who is on top of things, the girl with an agenda and an impressive resume and a long list of mentors and contacts from networking events. 

But right now, I'm not that girl, and I don't feel poised to be that girl. I must be that other girl, the girl who gets second billing in movies, the girl who uses campus activities, internships and networking to choose between a magazine byline, a business card or a frilly apron and baked goods.

And that's scary.

Mostly scary, but also a little exciting. I get a chance to fall in love - not with a guy, not yet, but with a career. I get to fall in love with strategic communications or fine arts event planning or splitting conjoined twins. 

And I get to savor all the details along the way.