Childhood Dreams

Just like any child, I too had my share of dreams.  Barely ten years old, I aspired to become a tourist guide, speaking different languages while showing foreigners the different tourist spots of our country.  I said to myself I will take up Foreign Service or a related course in college.  It seems that my love for travel has already manifested at a very tender age.

Photo taken from Google Images

A couple of years passed and this time I wanted to become a nurse.  Why a nurse not a doctor?  Doctors earn more than nurses.  I was inspired by the nurses who took care of me when I was hospitalized twice for appendectomy and chicken pox.  They were the ones that came to my room to check on my condition more often than my attending physician.  I already had a picture in my mind of myself in a white uniform, white cap, white shoes and white stockings.  I would be a perfect nurse, I was not squeamish to blood and other hospital stuff.  My dream of being a nurse was replaced when I was in junior year of high school.  What made me change my mind again?  

Photo taken from Google Images

In junior year, I was introduced to a subject that is totally new to me, Economics.  Economics is a social science that dwells into the production, distribution and consumption of goods and services.  I found market analyses using price, quantity, supply and demand very interesting.  Though what I had in high school was only a bird's eyeview of economics, nevertheless, it helped me on what course to take up in college.  Thirty years after, my children are questioning me why I took Economics.  All three of them find Economics boring.  Well, to each his own.

Barely two years after graduating from high school, I found myself a freshman at De La Salle University for a degree in Bachelor of Science in Applied Economics.  There was no turning back and I was able to graduate on time.  That course prepared me for my first job as a Money Market Trader at a quasi-banking institution.  I had a firsthand account of Economics at work.  It would have been a good foundation for a career in the financial market but was nipped in the bud with the collapse of the money market as a result of the assasination of Sen. Benigno Aquino, Jr.

On the hindsight, I would say that childhood dreams are more often than not products of the influences of the people around or events that happened in the past.