“What do you want to be when you grow up?” How many times did we hear as children?

For some of us, the answer came as naturally as breathing. We knew from the start what we were meant to do and be. I’m always amazed at the youngsters I see on social media who already know that they want to scientists, musicians or actors.

For the rest of us, the quest for an answer to that career question was more of shape-shifting journey than a set destination toward which to move.

My earliest memories were of wanting to be a nurse or a teacher. I grew up in the 1970s, and those were the most obvious career paths for little girls. Becoming a mother was another; a noble path that never did appeal to me.

When I was 8 or 9, I did what a lot of kids do: I became fixated with an area of interest. Mine was astronomy. I wanted to become an astronaut. Never mind that at that time no woman had ever gone into space. This, of course, would happen in 1983, when Sally Ride became the first woman to do so.

I was so enamored of this idea that I wrote to NASA about it. I’m sure I’m not the first nor the last kid to do that, but they sent me a bunch of cool brochures and material to fuel the dream.

This fixation might have had something to do with a unit in science class where we had to build our own spaceship. This would not be the last time that my teachers planted the seed of a career path in me.

A couple of years later, though, my career dreams shifted to more terrestrial concerns. I decided that I wanted to become a biochemist or a chemical engineer. This was prompted by the excellent teachers I had at Parkland Junior High in McHenry. I just loved learning about ecology, biology and chemistry.

About the same time, I also started to toy with the idea of becoming a librarian. The first library I worked in was the one at Parkland. I enjoyed being around books and being able to look up whatever my heart desired at any given moment. To be surrounded by books was a joy. Some things never change.

Throughout elementary school and junior high, I also learned that I love to work with words. However, even at a young age, I realized that becoming the next great American novelist probably was out of the question. For that, one needed a vivid imagination. I, sadly, have always been more inclined to immerse myself in someone else’s fictional world than create my own.

My career aspirations would pivot again once I got to high school. This time, the turning point was when I joined the debate team my sophomore year. This was in the early 1980s, when the news was filled with events of the Cold War. Ronald Reagan was president, and the Soviet Union was the chief adversary. The push and pull of international relations was endlessly fascinating to me, as well as downright scary at the prospect of “mutually assured destruction” from nuclear weapons.

The debate team also introduced me to the world of politics and government. The idea was to take a problem being faced by average people and figure out how to solve it. It appealed to my natural problem-solving nature, and it employed logic. It challenged me in ways that I found exciting.

Current events became the focus of my world. As a debater, these issues could be used in countless ways to shore up an argument or to attack an opponent’s point of view.

What I knew is that I did not want to go into government, per se. One need only look at how each administration changes personnel. That much job insecurity wasn’t something that appealed to me.

However, what I could do was write about these things. That’s about the time when the idea of becoming a journalist and going to journalism school was born.

The idea I had when I began at Northwestern’s Medill School of Journalism was to become a foreign correspondent in the Soviet Union. I even took four years of Russian to prepare.

What I discovered was that my dream didn’t sync up with reality. However, I did find that journalism allowed me to keep learning about government, medicine, astronomy and chemistry.

Community journalism, where I’ve found myself all these years later, has let me help people in countless ways. Informing people about things they need to know, or things they should know, still appeals to me. Helping someone find the resources they need is satisfying.

I might not have known the answer to “what do you want to be when you grow up?” at the beginning, but I think I wound up exactly where I was supposed to be.

• Joan Oliver is the former Northwest Herald assistant news editor. She has been associated with the Northwest Herald since 1990. She can be reached at jolivercolumn@gmail.com.