My future plans at the time I graduated from high school involved being a professional musician of some sort. I had also determined that I was going to be single my entire life due to the combination of the lack of interest in me by the opposite sex and the role models I had had up to that point in others that had made music their careers. I entered college straight out of high school and declared bassoon performance as my major with a secondary concentration on piano. Now, for someone that had been playing piano since he was 5 years old and had only been playing bassoon since the end of eleventh grade, this would seem to be a somewhat backwards order; but, I was able to hold my own on the bassoon during my senior year of high school against a fellow senior that had been playing for at least the past 4 years and a freshman that also had a year's head start on me. After that first year of college, I got my first ever job at Busch Gardens. Yes, I did say "first ever." I never had a job during high school like so many of my peers did.
The next school year was uneventful as I continued down the path I had begun the previous year and went back to the same job that summer. About a month before I was to go back to college for my third year, I started going out with the girl that would eventually become my wife. Though we had actually met the summer before, we worked in separate areas of the park so we didn't actually hit it off with each other until this summer.
Over the next few months, I began to realize that this was the person with whom I was destined to spend my life. I would propose marriage to her a mere 9 months after we began dating and we would get married 18 months following that. I also came to the realization that my original plans were insufficient for 2 reasons. First, music was something from which I derived great pleasure and being required to study and analyze every minute aspect of it to the extent required in order to receive a degree was draining a great deal of that enjoyment out of it. Second, I came to the conclusion that in order to provide for a wife and potentially a child or two, I would have to either be one of the top musicians in the country, which was quite unlikely, or change to an education major. So, after two and a half years of working toward a music degree, I withdrew from that degree to begin considering just what it was that I wanted to do for a career that I would actually enjoy doing that would also allow me to still have my music on the side for enjoyment.
Finding a position as a church musician gave me the outlet for using my musical talents to God's glory and my enjoyment. After a short stint working in retail, I was offered a temporary position with the accounts payable department of a national home builder and eventually decided upon accounting as my chosen career and applied to the local community college to begin an Associates degree. As I did not want to take on any more student loans, I had decided to pay for it all myself which meant one class each term due to time and money restraints and had fortunately taken both Principles of Accounting semester as well as a couple other general education credits before having to withdraw out again. It would be several years before I would be able to get back to working toward a degree.
The next few years would see me relocated from Virginia to South Carolina to avoid losing my job (and along with it the health insurance and 401(k) matching I had accrued), promoted into a supervisory position in charge of several accounts payable offices, and laid off due to the downturn in the housing market - all the while threatening to return to school to continue my degree. I had even applied and been accepted to the college I am now attending but never followed through to register for any classes. Being forced onto the job search showed me just how limiting not having some kind of degree really was when it came to finding new employment even with almost a decade of accounting experience under my belt. I felt intimidated to send in my resume for several jobs that listed they were looking for a degree and I'm also relatively sure I was overlooked by some of the job listings to which I did respond due to my lack of a degree.
Knowing that I needed some kind of credential to qualify my knowledge, I became a Certified Bookkeeper over the next few months and reapplied to the college to truly continue my degree. My student loans from my first degree attempt were just about paid off so I now felt comfortable taking on that kind of financial aid to finance this attempt to be able to work along on it at a decent pace. In a prime example of it being who you know more than what you know that matters when it comes to getting your foot in the door at a company, I was interviewed for and offered a job with the accounting department of another real estate company at about the same time as I started my first class toward completing my degree.
Now, if I can just keep up the momentum I have established over the last 4 terms, it should only take me an additional 7 terms to get that degree that was started a decade and a half ago. Wish me luck!
