More often than not, when you hear about someone’s internship you hear about how great it is and how they can’t wait for the day that they are a professional in the field. But every once and a while you’ll hear that it didn’t quite go as planned. Not to say that it was a bad experience, or that you never want to step foot near the field ever again, but rather it didn’t turn out to be the magical perfect experience you expected to be. And for me, this was the case. My internship changed my dream job, and I’m glad it did.

Ever since I was a little kid, I can remember wanting to be a teacher. Looking back now, I can remember saying in the third grade, a young kid myself, saying, “I love little kids” and proclaiming I would work with them someday. Over the years I bounced around from wanting to teach kindergarten, to third grade, to preschool, and even to art (Thankfully I figured out on my own that I didn’t exactly have the artistic abilities for that.) I was one of the few kids who knew going into high school what I wanted to go to college for: education. So when junior year came around and all the college brochures and postcards started popping up in the mail, I weeded out all the school’s that didn’t offer education. Until someone mentioned I look into speech pathology.

So when I was given the opportunity to participate in an internship senior year I was placed in two locations. One that would help me to eventually decide on a field of study and one that would help to see that my “dream job” wasn’t exactly all I thought it was cracked up to be. So ultimately due to my internship I was able to see that education wasn’t what I wanted to do for the rest of life. I was able to see that, as much as I liked to believe that young kids are always the cute, smiling faces, there’s a little bit more than cute when it comes to conducting a classroom. This all being said my internship experience wasn’t the magical experience that I had originally intended it to be, but I’m happy to say that it didn’t. Finding out that teaching was not the profession for me became one of the most helpful experiences that I’ve ever had. Not a bad one, but rather helpful. So overall, if you find yourself as the intern who just can’t seem to picture themselves as a future professional, don’t take it as a good thing gone wrong, but rather as some of the best advice you could ever give yourself.