When Childhood Ambitions Collide with Reality: Banking, Pharmacy, and Beyond

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Most of the time when I remember my childhood dream, I will just laugh it off. If you ask most children the question. "what do you want to be in the future", they will mention different professions and only a few people know what those professions are all about, I was once in that stage. My childhood dream then was to be a banker. My reason was that they save money in the bank and being close to where money is meant I will have lot of money (so I thought), kind of funny but that was my reason. As time passed, I started working towards it making some research on how to be a banker and also plan to join the commercial class in SS1 until my dad popped the question one day.

He asked "what do you want to be in future since you are going into the senior class" I said I want to be a banker and I could see the shock on his face, he asked why and I decided not to say anything. He replied that I should drop the idea, he is an accountant and he has a few banker friends, when I asked why, he said, bankers don't stay long in banks, they get sacked for no reason and he won't want that for me so I should join the science class and pick a new dream. I did and with time, I wished to be a computer scientist. But something else happened, my lesson teacher said something different when I wanted to make my jamb registration. He asked why not choose medicine or pharmacy, why computer science? Put it as a second choice and pharmacy as first choice. I had to give it a deep thought then decided pharmacy wasn't a bad choice.

If we get to minus the whole Nigeria context from everything, Pharmacy is actually a good profession, especially if you have the plan to further more outside the country. As they use to say, "Man proposes, God disposes", the university had other plans, changed my course from pharmacy to physiology. I even had to look up the word "Physiology" online before I could understand what the course is all about. Sometimes I do think about what life would have been as a banker, if I had stayed on the track, wouldn't the university still changed my course to something else? But with the way things are and how the world is evolving, tech here and there, I will just bury the childhood dream and focus on acquiring skills that are in demand.