Career Goal Essay

What is a goal? Is it the golden destination of one’s life, or a distinctive pathway that leads to this longed trophy? Or is it the ideas and sentiments behind this sought out milestone? For myself, the goal of what path my life should take has changed many a times throughout my childhood and young adulthood; but the idea behind this goal, or should I say these goals, has forever remained the same.
As a little girl running around my neighborhood streets, all I could ever think of becoming when I grew older was a doctor. At any gathering, countless relatives would ask me of what I wanted to be when I grew up, and the answer was always the same: a doctor. I never fully understood at the time what it was about becoming a doctor that made it such an aspiration for me, but the picture became clearer as I aged. Moving through the staircase of life, I felt my aspirations shift a tiny bit. Although, the tiny little girl inside me was still determined to be the doctor that would save countless lives, a larger part of me pictured myself standing in front of a classroom parting wisdom on to younger minds. I imagined creating lectures and inspiring little children into doing big things for their society. Yet still, my mind had not completely settled.
As I grew older still and entered University, I started finding myself more and more interested in the issues of the social work and the criminal justice system. I found myself drone towards not only crimes and their victims, but also towards what created circumstances fit for the formation of a criminal. The entire world surrounding the criminal justice system engulfed me, and this is where I decided to change my major to Criminal Justice. I found myself more and more keen to study about criminals not only to keep our society safe from criminals, but also to prevent flowers of our own society from wilting and turning into criminals.
I wondered why my career choices were so sporadic, and what caused me to be pulled towards them. By pondering over this, I realized that although these career choices may be far separated from each other, the idea behind them all was the same. My goal in life was not to become a doctor, or a teacher, or anything else; but my goal in life was to help people. What I wanted most out of my life was to positively affect as many people’s life as I could through my line of work in addition to my everyday activities. This realization has helped me shape my career goals in an effective manner. I aspire to use my studies to not only help stop and prevent crime, but also to understand the causes behind these crimes. I specially want to work with juvenile delinquents to help save our society’s youth from being plunged into a life of crime.
I strongly believe that the solution of any societal problem is not punishment, but an examination of its roots. By identifying the root causes of such problems, we can extinguish the problem to the best extent possible. I intend to work towards helping not only victims of crimes but also victims of criminality.