In my other, past, volunteer life, I used to interview scholarship applicants for our alumni group, and help select the winners. A couple of thoughts as I reflect on that process: 

-Jeez these kids are focused nowadays. You don’t see this in the media but these kids are taking AP and even college courses, getting A’s, working a full time job, AND putting in x number of hours of volunteer time. It was really quite astonishing to me.

-They seem to be so much more together, well spoken, wordly, maybe, than we were at that age. 

-We had some tough questions, and they were rarely rattled. Or if they were, I couldn’t tell. One question was: “What does this education mean to you in one word?” Most answered ‘opportunity’ or other such ‘safe’ answers. But the one I remember is the kid who said quietly ‘Everything’. He was the first in his family to go to college, and if I recall correctly, had emigrated from Africa. He wanted to be a doctor.

If you’re wondering what this has to do with technology, be patient, I’m getting there.

Another question we ask is ‘If you get to college and find you absolutely hate your major, what would your backup major be?’ When we formulated this question we thought we’d see a lot of Journalism/Criminology or Engineering/Computer Science. And we did see some of that. But the funny thing was, the answers started to surprise us. Engineering/Music. Business/Theatre. Almost complete polar opposites. Statistics/Nursing. It almost seems like it was a ‘what I should do’/’what I want to do’ type of thing.

So my question to you is, if you weren’t a mainframe sysprog, programmer, operator, manager, whatever you are, what *would* you be? Remove all the obstacles like money, location, etc. Just for the love of the game, what would you do for a living?

By the way, ‘everything’ kid had a great summer. He got his medical degree and got married. He is a huge success story; he’ll be a great doctor; and he’s a wonderful human being.

Your link today, for no particular reason whatsoever, is a link to the SHARE youtube channel videos:

https://www.youtube.com/user/shareorg/videos

Have a great day!

Mary Anne

z/OSSYgirl