“When I grow up I want to be….” Feel free to answer as your 5-year-old self or as of now.

The first time I remember thinking about what I want to do for a living, I was seven years old and flipping through an issue of American Girl magazine. I’d just graduated from Ladybug and it suddenly dawned on me that it was somebody’s job to put together the magazines I loved so much. I knew that I wanted it to be my job.

As years went by that dream stayed alive. In eighth grade I spent a day at D magazine in Dallas as part of a career investigations class at school. At the end of the school year I got into an argument with my guidance counselor as she tried to talk me out of taking journalism classes my freshman year of high school. You should take something you’ll get credit for, like health, she said. Or I can take a class that will set me on my career path, I rebutted.

I took the class and became editor-in-chief of the freshman yearbook. By my junior year I was a senior editor of the high school’s gigantic yearbook and my senior year I was editor-in-chief. I got a scholarship and headed to the Walter Cronkite School of Journalism and Mass Communication at Arizona State University. While I was there I interned for breaking-news websites and monthly magazines. Throughout school I dabbled in broadcast journalism and public relations. They didn’t feel right. My first job out of college was for daily newspapers, and now I work for a news site again.

Me with ASU’s mascot Sparky when I was just starting journalism school

Throughout it all, the dream is the same. Of those jobs, my favorites were for the magazines, and the ones where I got to blog. To this day, every decision I make is with the end goal of working in magazines again.

I feel so fortunate that I knew from a young age that this was the path for me. Not everyone is so lucky, but sometimes uncertainty is what keeps it exciting! I don’t know what I’ll end up doing, but I am definitely going to enjoy the ride.