What do you want to be?

A surgeon, a scientist, and a life-saver.

Years go by, the student never sways in her goals.

College.

What do you want to be?

I don't know. 

Why?

How can you ask that? How can you just figure that out?

You're in college, which means you must know.

It's not that simple, leave me alone.

The student is worried, and confused. 

Lost in this world, in a college she loves, with no goal in life

What do you want to be?

Please stop asking. I thought I knew, I thought I had a goal, but it changed. I changed.

 The student grows up. She learns. She understands. She visits new places and does new things.

I go to the library. I check out one book. Just one book changed my life. 

I read it.

What do you want to be?

I know now. I know. It isn't about what I want to be. It's about who. 

I want to be someone that digs through dirt, that discovers, that gets smeared in dust and mud.

I want to learn about the past, I want to live it, I want to imagine.

I want to be sweating and hot in the middle of a desert, elbows cracking and the taste of sediment and sand in my mouth.

I want to find theropods, fossils and bodies. 

Dinosaurs. 

What do I want to be?

A paleontologist.