Goal Girl’s Blog

Sometimes a goal isn’t as attractive in the close-up view…

From a very early age, I wanted to be a veterinarian.    I had a small menagerie at home, a closet full of reptiles (the closet was set up with shelves of aquaria with full-spectrum light, electric rocks for heating, etcetera), cats, birds, squirrels…  I hovered around the vet’s office down the block, making a total pest of myself.    By the time I was twelve, I had catalogs from about 15 different veterinary schools, and I had planned my highschool and college curriculum around the requirements of my favorites.

At thirteen, I started volunteering at the Lafayette Zoological Park (now the Virginia Zoological Park), still wanting to be a vet.   When “Tookie” the zoo’s vet-on-call came on campus, I followed him around like a lost puppy.   I fetched and carried during necropsies.  I read everything I could get my hands on.  I was one focused kid.   With a full schedule of classes, a 120-house paper route, editorial responsibilities on the school newspaper, I volunteered ten hours a week.  In the summer I volunteered forty hours a week.   Because I loved it, but also because I figured it would look good on an application for admission to a veterinary studies program.

My second year as a volunteer zookeeper, however, I met Chris, the curator of herpetology.    I was so enthralled with his stories of field trips to the Great Dismal Swamp to collect turtles and frogs, with the work he was doing banding and rehabilitating birds of prey, and frankly, I just liked the guy <grin>, that I “graduated” from shoveling poop of domestic hoof stock to working in the small exhibit house with Chris.     Chris was the bees-knees.    Chris was cool.  Chris took me under his wing, taught me tons on reptile husbandry, carpentry (building exhibits), trapping (for biological studies), measuring, identifying reptiles and amphibians and birds, etcetera, etcetera.   A few months under his tutelage and I no longer wanted to be a veterinarian.   Vets pretty much stayed in a clinic, or maybe took a trip to a farm, except for the very few zoo vets.   A biologist, however…  !    Biologists got to go on field trips.   Biologists got to sit in bird blinds on islands in the Chesapeake Bay, drinking hot coffee out of a thermos.  Biologists got to collect bags of frogs without anyone asking why, and to set up bucket traps and sort the thousands of cool insects, arachnids and small mammals they trapped.

So I changed course.   Instead of going to vet school after college, I went to graduate school.   By some strange twist of circumstances I ended up studying honey bee physiology. I got my masters degree in Animal Physiology (LSU), and a year and a half into my doctoral program realized… this wasn’t what I wanted to do when I grew up, i.e. sitting in a lab, peering through a dissecting scope, running trial after trial on the spectrophotometer, chromatographing until I was really sick of it.

So after leaving LSU “abd, “all but dissertation”, I joined the Louisiana Department of Wildlife and Fisheries doing sub-lethal oil spill effects monitoring.    Still some dissection involved, still some lab work involved, but hey, it got me out in a boat on the Gulf of Mexico on a regular basis.    Problem was, I was dirt poor.    So through several jobs I gradually gravitated toward the IT world and landed a position as the Director of Environmental Data Management at McNeese State University.   With a budget that allowed $20K for a database administrator.  I couldn’t get anyone to come for the interview for that money.  A little research taught me that a total newbie DBA, still wet behind the ears, earned more than twice what I was earning as a program director at a university!    With six months of hard study,  and a few tests, I was certified as an Oracle database administrator and hired by Oracle Corp.   The dba profession has been very good to me these past ten years.  I got to travel, I feel that the ever-changing technology keeps me mentally sharp.  I’ve made some good friends, and a heck of a lot more money than I would have made as a veterinarian or a biologist.   I ended up at a job that had insurance that covered the treatments I needed in order to be able to have my lovely daughter.    As an IT person I realized that a computer would really be an ideal gift for my mother, and as a result, she ultimately ended up working in internet support for the world’s largest bank.

Goals are good.   Flexible goals are not necessarily bad.   Don’t be afraid to re-evaluate your goals along the way!