"So, what do you want to do when you grow up?"

I realized a couple of weeks ago that I was nearly 34 years old before I figured out what I wanted to do when I grew up. That's no exaggeration; it wasn't until September 2005 that I realized I wanted to do research in mathematics. I remember the revelation vividly: I was sitting in my office at Wesleyan College late one evening, grading statistics papers. I counted how many papers remained in the pile and sighed, So this is what I'll be doing for the next 30-35 years of my life. The sinking feeling that followed that moment was not exactly encouraging—and it wasn't so much because I hated teaching statistics, as I hate grading papers.

By contrast, I spent a lot of free time doing research, and over the next few weeks I discovered that I enjoyed it and wanted more time for it. This surprised me, since for every one of the six years that I worked on my PhD, I told myself through grit teeth that I would put up with the research as long as necessary to allow me to pursue my real dream, which was teaching mathematics at the college level. Apparently, those six years of study had changed me and my interests in ways I hadn't noticed.

Indeed, I thought I wanted to be a math teacher for the previous 15 years—except for the three or four years in the mid-90s that I thought God was calling me to be a priest. Originally, I'd wanted to work as a high school math teacher, but two years of doing that cured me of it right quick! Before then, I had flirted with the notion of becoming a computer programmer—a notion which collapsed the moment I realized that spending 8 hours a day in front of a computer doing someone else's programming was staggeringly dull. Before that, I had considered politics—which ended the moment I realized that the combination of my personality and my idealism were not a good recipe. Before that, I don't remember, but at different points I wanted to be a private investigator, an archaeologist (thank you Indiana Jones), and even once a dictator, the modern Julius Caesar (seriously).

My father had once suggested that I consider journalism. That was probably good advice, but I was a senior in high school, so I never got around to thinking about it.

Based on my experience, I don't understand why in America we pressure children to start thinking in middle school about what they want to do when they grow up. I'm far from the first to observe that most Americans today change their jobs & even their careers at least once, and many (like me, and a number of my former grad student colleagues at NC State) change more than once. Spending one's entire life in one geographic location, doing one thing, appears to be a thing of the past. The great thing about America is that life here is sufficiently flexible that one can actually do this if you work hard and set your mind to it, and you can use it to your advantage. You can't do this in most countries; indeed, my experience is that the cultural mindset is such that most people can't even conceive of it.

On the other hand, I wonder whether our flexibility and mobility has negative effects on the sense of community and culture that we once had.

The key to all this is to give our students a good education in technical skills, and to teach them that most people can do different things if they try hard enough. If we spend all our time complaining about how hard life is—when, really, we're quite lucky here to have stable governments and a vigorous, if endangered, respect for the law and the officers who enforce it—then we will not pass on the cultural capital necessary to maintain the land of opportunity.

I'm not expressing myself well, and I'm not qualified to speak on anything more than my experience, so all of this should be taken with a grain of salt. Nevertheless, I marvel that it took me 34 years to realize what I wanted to do in life—and that, even then, I was able to find a job doing it.