“What do you want to be when you grow up?”

It’s a question I’m sure most of us have been asked ever since we were little.

And when I was younger, I always had an answer.

I never really said, “I don’t know.” I was certain. At one point, I wanted to be a teacher. Then I wanted to be a singer. Later, I decided I wanted to be a businesswoman.

Each answer felt permanent at the time.

When you’re a kid, choosing a future feels strangely simple. You find something you love, picture yourself doing it forever, and announce it like you’ve already made the decision.

Then you grow up.

Suddenly, “What do you want to be?” stops feeling like a fun question and starts feeling like one you’re supposed to have figured out.

By the time I got to college, my answer had become a lot less straightforward. 

Helping beyond a classroom

When I was younger, one of my first answers to the question was being a teacher.

At the time, I imagined “teaching” in the most obvious way: standing at the front of a classroom, helping students learn, and probably writing things on a whiteboard. As I got older, that dream eventually faded and was replaced by completely different ones. For a while, I assumed that meant I had simply grown out of it.

But looking at my life at URochester now, I’m not sure I ever completely did.

I currently work as a Chinese tutor at the Language Center and a TA for CHIN 101, where I get to help other students practice speaking, pronunciation, grammar, and whatever they might be struggling with. I’m obviously not standing in front of my own classroom like younger me once imagined, but there is something really rewarding about watching someone understand something that confused them a few minutes earlier.

Maybe the job title changed, but the part of me that likes helping someone get from “I don’t understand this” to “Ohhh, I get it now” is still very much there.

And I’ve realized that wanting to help people has shown up in other parts of my college experience too.

Through Alpha Phi Omega, a professional community service fraternity, I’ve had the opportunity to participate in service and take on different leadership roles. I previously served as Pledge Educator, where I helped guide new members as they learned about the organization and became part of the community and now I’m the publicity chair. Whether I’m directly helping someone through community service, supporting other members, or contributing to something larger than myself, I keep finding myself drawn to roles where I can be useful to other people.

I’ve written before about that same idea of helping freshmen feel supported through my experience as a D’Lion, especially after remembering how overwhelming my own transition to college felt. 

Read my D’Lion blog →

None of those experiences made me suddenly decide that I should switch my major and become a teacher.

But they did make me realize that sometimes an old dream doesn’t disappear just because your career plans change.

Sometimes you keep the reason you wanted the dream, even when you let go of the job title.

For me, I think the “teacher dream” was always less about standing in a classroom and more about helping people learn, grow, or feel a little more supported.

I just didn’t know there were so many different ways to do that yet.

Finding a different rhythm

After wanting to be a teacher, there was a point when my answer changed completely.

I wanted to be a singer.

Music was one of the first things that made me realize how much I liked being creative. I loved the idea of being able to take a song, make it your own, and connect with people through something as simple as your voice. For a while, I could genuinely picture that being my future.

Eventually, though, singing stopped being the career I imagined for myself.

But unlike some of my childhood plans, it never really left my life.

At URochester, I’ve been able to keep that side of myself through performing as a vocalist with NJR. I still get to sing, rehearse, perform in front of people, and experience the nervousness right before going onstage followed by the relief of realizing, “Okay, I actually did it.”

One of my favorite memories is having my friends show up to support me at my first vocal performance in Hirst Lounge. It reminded me that something doesn’t have to become your profession for it to remain an important part of who you are.

I think I used to see career decisions as an either-or choice. If I wasn’t going to become a singer, then maybe singing was something I had to leave behind as I became more “serious” about my future.

College has shown me that growing up doesn’t necessarily mean giving up the things you once imagined for yourself.

Sometimes, they just find a different place in your life.

Not every passion has to be the main act to deserve a place on the stage.

For me, singing became less about what I wanted to be and more about something I simply wanted to keep doing.

Maybe singing wasn’t the career that ended up being the right note for my future.

But that doesn’t mean I have to stop singing along.

Turning an interest into a direction

Eventually, “singer” became “businesswoman.”

Which sounds very impressive, but also incredibly vague.

At the time, I liked the idea of building something for myself, being independent, and having the freedom to turn an idea into something real. I knew I was drawn to business, but I did not really understand how many different directions that could take me.

Coming to URochester helped me start putting names to those interests.

Through my business classes, I’ve been able to explore entrepreneurship, marketing, strategy, presentations, and the way companies grow and communicate with people. The more I learned, the more I realized that saying “I want to work in business” was a little like saying “I want to work with people.” It was technically true, but there was still a lot left to figure out.

Entrepreneurship especially stood out to me because I liked the idea of creating something from the beginning. There is something exciting about starting with an idea and asking: Could this actually work? Who would want it? How would I make it different?

But college has also shown me that figuring out what you want to do does not always happen through one class or one major.

Sometimes it happens because you keep noticing which assignments you enjoy a little more than the others.

Which conversations you keep thinking about after class.

Which parts of a project you volunteer to take on without anyone asking.

I came to URochester knowing I wanted to study business.

I just didn’t know yet which part of business would start feeling the most like me.

And eventually, one direction kept showing up.

Not every dream has to become a plan the moment you have it. 

Sometimes a dream can give you a direction without giving you a map. 

Where creativity found a canvas

The more I explored business, the more I started noticing that I was always drawn to the creative side of it.

One of the biggest clues came from something I was already doing outside the classroom: publicity.

Through my roles as Publicity Chair for both D’Lion and Alpha Phi Omega, I’ve spent a lot of time creating graphics, writing captions, promoting events, and figuring out how to get people to actually pay attention to what we are putting out.

At first, I thought of it mostly as designing.

Make something that looks good. Post it. Move on to the next thing.

But the more I did it, the more I realized there was a lot more thought behind it.

A few weeks ago, one of my brothers in Alpha Phi Omega told me that someone had come to one of our general member meetings because they saw our posts on Instagram and thought “This seems pretty cool.”

It was such a small comment, but I remember thinking about it afterward.

Someone had seen something I helped create, became curious enough to learn more, and actually showed up.

That was when publicity felt like more than just making posts.

I wasn’t just decorating the message. I was learning how to frame it so someone else would stop and look.

Publicity gave me a canvas where creativity and business could finally exist in the same space. I could play around with a design or spend too long deciding on the right wording, while also thinking about the audience, engagement, and what I actually wanted someone to do after seeing it.

And the more I did it, the more marketing stopped feeling like an abstract subject I was studying and started feeling like something I could actually see myself doing.

Sometimes you don’t discover an interest because you went looking for it. You realize you’ve already been doing it.

Maybe I had been searching for the right career with a blank canvas in front of me.

And for me, publicity was one of the first places where I started adding color to it.

Still on the menu

More recently, I’ve started thinking about another possibility for my future: opening a restaurant of my own.

I love to cook in my free time, but I don’t know if that is exactly where I will end up. I don’t have a restaurant concept planned out, a timeline, or even a guarantee that I will still want the same thing years from now.

I just know that it is something I would love to experience.

And strangely, the idea makes a lot of my other interests feel less disconnected.

A restaurant would involve much more than food. There is the concept, the atmosphere, the branding, the way people discover it, and the experience you create for the people who walk through the door.

Every version of my answer has told me something about what I care about. Teaching was about helping people. Singing gave me a creative outlet. Business made me curious about how ideas become something real. Marketing showed me that creativity and strategy don’t have to exist separately.

Maybe a restaurant will eventually be the place where all of those things meet.

Maybe it won’t.

And I think that is something I am becoming more comfortable with.

I’ve always been indecisive, especially when there are a lot of options in front of me. Maybe my future is no different.

My future is a menu of possibilities, and I’m still deciding what I want to order. For once, I don’t feel rushed to choose.

Not on the syllabus

Some of the experiences that have shaped me the most don’t fit neatly underneath the word “business.”

I tutor Chinese.

I sing.

I help build community as a D’Lion.

I’m part of a sorority.

I’ve taken on different leadership roles in student organizations.

I’ve had positions where I needed to mentor people, positions where I needed to create things, and positions where I mostly needed to listen.

None of those experiences look exactly alike on paper.

But I don’t think they’re supposed to.

Tutoring has taught me how differently people communicate and learn. Performing has pushed me to be more comfortable being seen and heard. Leadership has taught me that getting people excited about an idea sometimes matters just as much as having the idea in the first place. Publicity has shown me how much I enjoy combining creativity with strategy.

And classes have given me language for things I was already beginning to notice about myself.

Sometimes your major tells you what you’re studying.

The rest of college tells you who you are while you’re studying it.

Some of the most important lessons I’ve learned at URochester were never on a syllabus. 

Still writing the answer

For a long time, I thought changing my answer meant I was getting further away from figuring myself out.

College has made me realize it might mean the opposite.

Every version of what I wanted to be has shown me something about what I value, what excites me, and what kind of future I might want to create.

Some dreams stayed. Some changed. Some found a different place in my life.

And others are still possibilities I’m figuring out.

I used to think growing up meant eventually choosing one answer and sticking with it.

Now, I know it can also mean learning which pieces of your old answers you want to carry with you.

That is probably one of the biggest things URochester has taught me so far. You don’t have to arrive on campus with your entire future already planned. Sometimes the class you take because it sounds interesting, the organization you join on a whim, or the position you never expected to hold ends up teaching you something important about yourself.

And sometimes, figuring yourself out looks a lot like changing your mind.

I still don’t have my entire future mapped out.

But I’m starting to think that might be the point.

So, what do I want to be when I grow up?

I’m not sure I can fit the answer into one job title anymore.

And for the first time, I’m okay with that.

Instead of seeing that as uncertainty, I see it as possibility.

College hasn’t given me one path to follow. It’s given me enough room to discover which pieces of different paths I want to make my own.

It just means I’m still becoming.

And if you’re applying to college without knowing exactly what you want to study, what career you want, or where you see yourself years from now, I hope you give yourself permission to explore too.

You don’t have to know exactly where you’re going before you get here.

Sometimes college is where you begin finding out.

And as for my answer?

I’m still writing it.