like others I've tried a bit of everything: starting with bowling pin resetter as a kid...Waiter, food prep, Valet and mental health tech in college...photo journalist, newspaper reporter writer - which was my all time favorite occupation and I don't know why I didn't make a career of writing for papers - it was an absolute blast and totally fullfilling and interesting - where did I go wrong...that was the one path I'm pretty sure I would have been happy with but it was a paid college internship in a field I was not even studying that I just lucked into one day after writing an editorial and sending it to the local paper, a stint as a used car lot co-owner and sales, another stint in new car sales at a dealership after my used car partner bilked me out of everything, which was one of my worse jobsSSSS! but I was good at it, exercise jockey at race tracks around country for 2 years between college stints - that was fun but also a scary look into the backside life of horseracing - not all so pretty, Financial Planner for 7 years was my longest J.O.B. and initially was so rewarding and exciting and fullfilling but after 80 hr weeks for 7 years I was so sick of it, Bank Customer Service while in college the 4th time around, at which time I finally got my BA in Psychology and Anthropology - it took 21 years :) - business owner since 1999 when after getting my degree I didn't feel like getting an standard entry level position in corporate america, was tired of financial planning, tired of banking, and could not imagine something in the corp world that was going to be interesting to me...so I scraped up enough money - a little more than 50 cents - to buy a shoe string, and suspending the 50 cent shoe string creatively I financed the necessary capital investment, and went full speed ahead in a make or break bid to own a business....literally make it or declare bankruptcy was the strategy....and surprisingly been in business 5 years now....lol. I guess sink or swim has always worked well with ADD personalities... In my last college stretch, I actually found out there is a ton of free psych and education and career testing available in the student counseling center, so I availed myself of those services, and was very surprised to find that my ultimate occupation would be doctoral level psycyhologist.... they have a test there that compares your tested traits to those of 500 successful satisfied happy people in every catagory of job, and then rates your compatibility with those.... my compatibility with psychologists was 86%, with medicine was 77% and with lawyers was 76%. I don't think I could cut medical school because I can't recall latin words and it is literally like torture for me to remember anatomy. I called 10 lawyers and 8 of them were unhappy with their careers!!! Sad but true. I called 10 psychologists and 10 of them were very happy with their careers...so that helped me choose between law and psychology. I suggest people thinking of career changes try calling 10 people in that field out of the yellow pages and find out more about that job and whether those people are happy in it. Here I am 5 years later beginning to implement the doctoral program in Clinical Psychology, which will take 5 years to complete, and Gee Whiz... I hope this job lasts a long time...maybe the rest of my life...... lol. In the meantime I will continue to own and operate my business...which was initially conceived of to put me through grad school and now I think it finally will. After I get my doctorate, I will keep this business, as a couple psychologists have told me they would like to have a small fun business on the side in addition to their practices because psychology gets so serious. I might someday be able to give the business to my children if I ever don't need the income. They helped conceive of it by showing me waht kids like, and they hold the titles of VP around here! Its a kids business naturally!

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