Astronaut. President. Quarterback. Fireman. When you probe the minds of elementary schoolchildren as to what they want to be - when they grow out of finger-painting and enter the real world - these are the responses they sling at you. Personally, at the tender age of 5, I wanted to be a boy.

Not the most logical career choice, not to mention the high price of a sex-change operation, but that is what I wanted. I wanted to be a boy. I also wanted to be Cinderella. It puts an entirely “movie-of-the-week starring David Hasselhoff” spin on the age-old fairy tale, doesn’t it? The question at hand, however, is what do you want to be now?

At the age of 18 when “the man” persuaded you to declare a major and solidify the next 30 years of your life, before you were allowed to legally drink nonetheless, what did you decide? I chose; I rechose; and I settled on the nondescript major known as “interdisciplinary humanities.” According to InternshipUSA.com, Jobtrak.com and everyone who looks at me as if they just sat on a cleat when I tell them my major, lucrative jobs for those of us who are interdisciplinary and human are few and far between.

As far as I know, “interdisciplinary humanities” could be code for “one who slings hash.” Which leads me to wonder: How many students trudging through their monotonous day still want to be an astronaut? Who reading this is willing to give up smoking in order to pursue a childhood fixation with the long jump? A better question yet, why haven’t you?

After I came to the painful realization that becoming Cinder-boy was not in the cards, it was time for my fallback plan: actress. I was Mrs. Cottontail in our second-grade production of “Peter Cottontail” and I wowed the audience. A few of the kids even stopped picking their noses long enough to stick their tongues out at me. My teacher, Mrs. Burrell, strode up to me after the performance and stated, with utmost sincerity, “Katie, you should be an actress when you grow up.” Since then, a desire to perform boils on the backburner of my mind. Perhaps that same sensation plagues the throngs of wanna-be singers, artists and firemen lurking around campus under the protective guise of “marketing,” “finance” and “electrical engineering.”

For a while, I abandoned the notion of one day wielding an Oscar. It was not “logical” or “safe” and “what if I didn’t make it