Eagles may soar, but weasels don't get sucked into jet-engines

My thesis was officially finished and handed in for evaluation by my thesis advisor a few days ago and I am one step closer to being a real, live grown-up with a real, live masters degree. One small step for man-kind, one giant leap for Choochoo.

On second thought, I’m so surrounded (buried) in boxes, I probably can’t even manage a small skip right now, let alone a leap, giant or otherwise.

In a few short weeks I’ll officially be a molecular biologist. Who’d have thunk it. No, seriously. I nearly flunked science in high school. I think the only reason why I didn’t was because my teacher felt sorry for me.

But I digress. Not that digressing isn’t something that happens a lot around here, and you should all be well used to this by now.

But I digress again.

When I was a kid, I was ambitious on the verge of insanity. For my sixth birthday, the only thing I really wanted was a briefcase. I was bottle-fed episodes of LA Law, I dreamt of becoming a lawyer, just like the ones on TV, and I kept that idea right up until the time came for me to start applying for colleges. That was when it finally occurred to me that an urge to wear power suits and carry a briefcase probably wasn’t the best basis for a career choice.

I then focused on the second thing on my list of obsession: forensic psychology. I’ve always had a weird fascination with the criminally insane. Not so much that I’d want to get together and drink cosmopolitans with them on a Saturday night, but I wouldn’t be opposed to prodding around inside their minds under less intimate circumstances.

The following year I went to university on a scholarship, determined to become the world’s greatest forensic psychologist. Determined right up until the point where the professor walked in on our very first lecture and said: “You will not become good psychologists if you study here.” He then continued to explain that we wouldn’t be given the option to specialize unless we chose to complete our full educations abroad and even if we wanted to become general psychologists (which I didn’t) we would still have to graduate with honors and then wait for as much as five years before we would be allowed past the first year of the study. Needless to say that was a bit of a motivation-killer. Perhaps the system has changed since then, but that was the way it was at the time.

There’s a part of me that still wants to be a criminal profiler, but I do think that viruses and such can be every bit as cool as a serial killer, in their own special way.

Oh dear, I’ve digressed again, haven’t I? I meant for this to be a post on growing up and living up to your ambitions. My point was that, although I might have fancied myself an eagle when I was a child and although I am still very much a career girl at heart, I would rather not be sucked into a jet engine.