kartooner

Tonight I con­tinue my quest for knowl­edge, fame and for­tune, or at the very least one of those. After an almost 3-year hia­tus and 60 cred­its later, I’ve decided to go back to col­lege to obtain my bach­e­lors degree in Visual Com­mu­ni­ca­tions and Graphic Design.

An odd sense of dejavu over­came me last night when I was load­ing up a shop­ping cart with peechee fold­ers, pen­cils and note­books. It made me think back to when I’d day­dream in class, won­der­ing if I’d ever reach my pro­fes­sional goal in life and if I’d be happy with my decisions.

My goal sev­eral years ago was to work in the field of graphic design and web devel­op­ment. After mov­ing to New York in 2002, I got a job at KBToys, work­ing there for 5 months and barely mak­ing ends meat. Even­tu­ally I answered an ad for “data entry” at a local tech com­pany and men­tioned my back­ground (both self-taught and edu­cated) in web devel­op­ment and design. After a year work­ing under the title, sub-contractor, the com­pany I work for offi­cially hired me, with ben­e­fits, on their full time staff.

I’ve heard of peo­ple tak­ing a break from edu­ca­tion, promis­ing they’ll return and never do. Many times it’s due to increased respon­si­bil­i­ties or dis­trac­tions and in this case you can’t blame a per­son. How­ever, I see this as another step­ping stone in my life and some­thing I need to do in order to feel sat­is­fied about my career. Not only that, but it’s guar­an­teed that this will open other avenues in my life; per­son­ally, pro­fes­sion­ally and spiritually.

Last night my 8-month old daugh­ter and I sat down to watch Charlotte’s Web on DVD. She sat through the entire movie, rest­ing her head on my leg and sip­ping on her bot­tle. Dur­ing the film, Char­lotte reminds Wilbur the pig to keep his chin up. It’s a mes­sage for every­one, to keep our chins up and make our way through life, worry less about frus­tra­tions and focus more on bet­ter­ing our­selves. It’s some­thing I’ve reit­er­ated before, but it’s true and some­thing to remem­ber in order to keep your­self on track with your goals and desires. Remem­ber that there will always be a reward for hard work and per­se­ver­ance and it’s only up to you and the sup­port of your friends and fam­ily to reach your goals.

My daugh­ter, still an infant, may not be able to under­stand “keep­ing her chin up”, but some­day she’ll fig­ure it out and when she does, I’ll be there to sup­port her 100 percent.