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How You Found Your Cutie Mark (What You want to do and stuff)

edited July 2011 in Everything Else
We have so many amazing people here! Modelers, a juggler, comic artists, super IT guys, and a load of college students going towards their goal! So how did all of you found out that thing you wanted to do as a career?

Due to wanting to change majors again and having so many thing I want to do in design, I feel like a blank flank. -_-
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  • There was an Apple // in the classroom in Kindergarten. Game Over.
  • When I was little, I wanted to be a fireman. When I realized that was impractical, I decided I wanted to make video games. RIT had a Game Design major. Done.
  • I like music and I like computers, so smush 'em together and you get audio engineering.
  • When I was little, I wanted to be a fireman. When I realized that was impractical, I decided I wanted to make video games. RIT had a Game Design major. Done.
    How is being a fireman impractical?
  • When I was little, I wanted to be a fireman. When I realized that was impractical, I decided I wanted to make video games. RIT had a Game Design major. Done.
    How is being a fireman impractical?
    Impractical for me, since I am not brave.
  • edited July 2011
    I wanted to do complex surgeries and be able to operate on patients until I retired and require problem solving on a daily basis (something that wouldn't bore me).
    Going through Medicine meant I had to wait till I was in my late 30's early 40's before being a primary surgeon in a hospital, so I chose to be a Veterinarian rather than be a Medical Surgeon. I didn't realise how much fun the Veterinary Sciences course was and how broad the field was but am thankful for it.

    (I chose really late, as in - the day before the final choices had to be sent to Universities - I was torn between Engineering and Health Sciences). I occasionally wonder about going back to University and doing Medicine or doing IT but still find my work rewarding.
    Post edited by sK0pe on
  • Impractical for me, since I am not brave.
    That's easily remedied by training.
  • There wasn't really one defining moment for me, more like a series of inspirations and happy coincidences, and the willingness to keep exploring the next interesting thing, and eventually the understanding that the exploration itself is what makes me happy, not the particular field/job/etc. Basically I like learning new stuff.

    So maybe that's what my cutie mark would point to, the learning itself and not the specific field. (Oh man, does that make me Twilight Sparkle? I would SO rather be Pinkie Pie.)
  • Impractical for me, since I am not brave.
    That's easily remedied by training.
    I'm also really skinny, don't like working out, and just wound up not wanting to be a Fireman anymore. It just seemed really impractical for someone of my overall persona (skinny nerdy kid who likes video games, anime, and computers) to become a big strong fireman on call to save lives.
  • edited July 2011
    Due to wanting to change majors again and having so many thing I want to do in design, I feel like a blank flank. -_-
    I have blank flank issues as well. So much so that I just have a liberal arts degree. I really should go back to school or get some kind of vocational training.
    Post edited by Josh Bytes on
  • My late grandfather introduced me to DOS way back in the day, and gave me an old laptop that ran DOS, probably when I was 5 or 6. I don't even have that laptop anymore or know anything about it, but I do remember the exact moment I typed something in that didn't return "Syntax Error." I was so proud.
  • I was an engineering student. I got to the end of Calc 2 and realized that I had a venomous hatred for calc and wouldn't be happy at all if I had to math all day for the rest of my life. About the same time, I made a list narrowing down my principle employment interests; that is, those things I could do no matter what the salary and still be happy at the end of the day (provided I could make above living wage). When I got it down to Biology and Travelling, radiology just sort of clicked. I started the pre-med track and never looked back.
  • Started writing short stories when I was 12. Haven't stopped since.
  • edited July 2011
    First I wanted to be a knight. Knights were awesome. They fought dragons. They used swords. They wore armor. They had horses. What's not to love about being a knight?

    Then I wanted to build robots. Mega Man was Mega Tough, and could do anything since he was a robot. So I wanted to build robots.

    Then I wanted to be a poet, because I won some random contests in first and second grade and stuff was published with my name in it.

    Then I wanted to make video games. But I didn't know how, and writing letters to companies asking how usually got me cool trinkets and marketing materials, but didn't really tell me what I needed to know.

    Then I wanted to make webcomics, because that's what the cool guys on the internet were doing, and I thought they were totally awesome.

    Then I wanted to be a fighter pilot. I enrolled in cadet programs and tried to get my private pilots license. Little did I know the former program had some serious problems and the latter was not economically feasible for my family.

    Then I wanted to be a journalist, because what's better than writing? And I could even be a video game journalist...

    Then I applied to my University for Computer Science, because I thought I would be good at that. And that's where I've been.

    I can't say that any of the above don't appeal to me anymore. I'd love to do all of them.

    But if I had a defining "thing" about myself that always reflected my interests, it would probably be running games for people. At three and four I had watched my grandfather play zelda and later dragon warrior. I would draw the inventory lists from the games and their instruction manuals. I would make up games for my cousins and brothers to play, and as the oldest of them I usually orchistrated these kinds of things on weekends when we would all be at my grandparents. I would try to get my friends to play "the game" (essentially LARPing) based on my rules and lists. And we had a lot of fun. I learned how to play the bad guy, take the loss, and roleplay all sorts of characters. This came and went. Eventually there was Heroquest and some other quasi board-game/rpgs. Then later yet there was D&D. And making games that were fun for other people has basically been my defining schtick for my entire life. Maybe my "cutie mark" would be a chaos sorcerer, or dice and a DM screen.
    Post edited by Anthony Heman on
  • edited July 2011
    From the moment I was sentient, possibly before, I wanted to be an astronaut. When I was three years old, I corrected the placement of wallpaper in my room on the basis that Jupiter was upside-down. I used to go swimming because the feeling of weightlessness was similar to freefall. I was kicked out of science class because I would just talk about space the entire time. Looking back on my little notebooks from early grades, it's filled with drawings of rockets, space shuttles, and people in spacesuits. I had read more books about space than most children my age had read at all. Space was my life.

    When I was eight, I got glasses. Once the implications sunk it, that I could not be an astronaut with less that perfect vision, I cried for a week straight. You couldn't even be a lousy fighter pilot.

    So, as I sat in class, dejected, no idea where I was going, I kept drawing little spaceships. Throughout the rest of elementary school and high school I had a pencil in my hand, drawing and designing and writing stories. I've never really been able to focus on anything else, the creative drive sort of consumes me. I can barely go a day without drawing something; I actually have a hard time at cons as a result.

    If I'm not able to go out and explore new worlds, I'll make them myself.

    That's how I became an artist. It's also why the space core makes me tear up a bit.
    Post edited by open_sketchbook on
  • edited July 2011
    So how did all of you found out that thing you wanted to do as a career?

    Due to wanting to change majors again and having so many thing I want to do in design, I feel like a blank flank. -_-
    This is an interesting thread, Viga. I've usually had a clear idea of what I wanted to do with my life, and I genuinely sympathize with people who don't know what they want to do. My girlfriend is kinda in the same place right now, and we've talked about it a lot. Honestly, I think you might be asking the wrong question, as far as figuring out what you want to do goes. It looks like almost everyone in posting in this thread found their "calling" pretty young. I think maybe you need to look for who are in your place, or have been in your place and eventually found their answer.

    Anyway, as useless as it'll probably be to someone in your situation, here's my story:
    I pretty much always wanted to be a comic book artist. As a kid, I used to draw little comic strips and comic books. Drawing was how I spent most of my free time from as far back as I can remember, until I was about 20. Toward the end of that period, my focus shifted from comic books to illustration -- I thought I'd be painting book covers and the like. Then I joined a band, and basically quit drawing for for most of my twenties. When I was about 27, I'd been working the night shift at Target for four years, and I realized that I had no plan for my life, and wasn't going anywhere. It scared me enough to go running back to the one thing that I had any reasonable expectation of being able to make a living at. I had a few false starts getting back into art, and my skills had atrophied pretty badly -- I recently pulled out some old high school sketchbooks, and was appalled to discover that I had drawn better at 16 than I did at 27. I think it was tough to get back into because my motivation was fear of the future, rather than love for drawing. But as I drew more and more, I fell more and more back in love with art, and eventually something clicked, and I was able to get really serious and make art my priority again. From there, it was/is just a matter of time.
    Post edited by Funfetus on
  • I'm kind of a blank flank, which is why I chose to go to a liberal arts college even though I have leanings toward CS and math in general. I love me some learnin', but I also love seeing how things fit together. I'm considering CS, math, and/or psych degrees, as well as internet studies.
  • I wonder, if you made a career out of recursion, would your cutie mark be of yourself with a cutie mark of yourself with a cutie mark of yourself with a cutie mark of yourself?
  • edited July 2011
    I wonder, if you made a career out of recursion, would your cutie mark be of yourself with a cutie mark of yourself with a cutie mark of yourself with a cutie mark of yourself?
    There's a gif of that with Apple Bloom...
    image
    Post edited by Axel on
  • I started to think and now I'm studying philosophy.
  • I started to think and now I'm studying philosophy.
    image
  • edited July 2011
    When I was little, I wanted to be a Disney animator, but when they closed their hand drawn animation studio and focused completely on CG, I felt very betrayed. I was very listless until the first time my family made the pilgrimage out to Disneyland and my mom bought me a book called The Haunted Mansion: From the Magic Kingdom to the Movies and I finally had a calling in life again. That book made me want to be an Imagineer.

    Also, I took an animation survey class and found out that I do not have the patience to animate anything.
    Post edited by Li_Akahi on
  • a cutie mark of yourself?
    I imagine your Cutie Mark as an image of you beating a T. Rex to death with a Howitzer Barrel.
  • a cutie mark of yourself?
    I imagine your Cutie Mark as an image of you beating a T. Rex to death with a Howitzer Barrel.
    Someone should draw this immediately.
  • edited July 2011
    Someone should draw this immediately.
    I am not a brony, but I fully endorse - and, in fact, encourage - people drawing either me as a pony, or me beating a t-rex to death with a howitzer barrel purely for the entertainment inherent within such a thing.

    Not that I endorse violence against Tyrannosaurs, of course. I mean, look at the thing. Or, skeletons of it, anyway. It's got wee little arms, poor thing can't even wank, you'd be pissed off and eat dinosaurs too.
    Post edited by Churba on
  • Career wise I am like Applejack. My Opa was a Trucker, my Dad is a Trucker, and I am a Trucker.

    As far as stuff I like and am passionate about, my Dad had an Atari 2600, my elementary school had Apple //s, and my Uncle was into this weird thing called anime.
  • I am a Trucker.
    No shit? I've always been intrigued by the hazmat and oversized load guys I see around here. Particularly, there's a group in charge of hauling these oversized torpedo-shaped containers tucked beneath tarps and labeled with the Radioactive Trefoil. I'm pretty sure they hold waste rods from local nuclear plants.
  • I don't know what I want to do yet, but I want it to be cool and creative.
  • After working for years as a freelance computer technician, It really bothered me how so many people's computer woes could be solved with just a little knowledge. After hearing Leo Laporte' as the Tech Guy, I got my inspiration. It helped that people have always told me I had a good voice.
  • Up until high school, I was always the best in my class by a landslide when it came to math. In 7th and 8th grade, our teacher occasionally had us play a game where he'd ask us math questions and whoever answered first got a piece of candy. He'd set a limit "Cameron can only win five". Sometimes this game was played with two teams. My class was a "sausagefest" (7 girls out of about 40 kids), so when someone suggested "boys against girls", someone else suggested "boys against girls and Cameron". We won.

    In high school, I joined the robotics team, which competes in Botball. Our first year was a huge success (although I can't take any credit for it; we didn't end up using the only part I built). We swept all three categories (unopposed, head-to-head, and documentation) in our regional competition, then went on to win third place in the international tournament. Since then, I've become head of mechanics for the team.

    Also in high school, I got my TI84 calculator. I more-or-less taught myself how to program on it and have now written about 100 programs, either complete or in progress. Because of this, I wanted to go into computer science, even though I didn't even know what object-oriented programming was. I applied for an internship at Microsoft for this summer. I was brought in for an interview, but I didn't get the job. That was when I realized that I really don't know shit about computer science, and had better either learn or pick a different career.

    Yet another thing that started in high school was learning Chinese. I don't really like learning the language, but I love knowing it. I took these god-awful Spanish classes in elementary school and junior high, so I originally started Chinese just to get away from Spanish. It's really panned out since then.

    Because of my love of math and robotics, I want to major in engineering. I also want to minor in Chinese and either do study abroad or a foreign internship in China. I don't really want to major in computer science, but I'm still learning some coding.
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