Once upon a time, I believed that I knew exactly what I was going to do; in school and in life. I was going to be an Architect, design fantastic buildings, earn accolades and a boat-load of cash doing something that I truly loved. What I didn't realize until I got to college was that I was terrible at math. Being an architecture major; the math thing was an issue. So, I did what every other red-blooded, American 3.9, honors high school graduate would do; I partied for a year and a half until my GPA dropped to a 1.2 and then I dropped out of college.

After some soul searching (and some well-needed rest), I came to the realization that sometimes just enjoying a particular field of study isn't enough. Sometimes, you have to come to grips with the idea that in every field of endeavor there has to be an element of aptitude involved for success. There also however has to be a decision about even if you are successful in your degree field, would you be successful in your professional life and enjoy the kind of life that the career affords you.

After I dropped out of college, I took some time off to decide what I wanted out of life and what I was good at. I always wanted a high salary; in fact, I just plain needed it. I know that people always say that money doesn't buy happiness, but, I'm sorry, that's a lot of hooey. Can't money buy you things that make you happy? Time with your family on a nice vacation? A pool in your backyard? There's nothing wrong with wanting to earn a good salary and one should never convince oneself otherwise. Also, the idea of being able to travel for my job was interesting. I had always been good at sales but not hard sales, so it would have to be professional sales to professional type people. Oh, and I would have to earn a large sum of money (did I say that part already?). This thought process eventually brought me to what I wanted to major in.

Over the period of about six months (and some serious sleepless nights for my parents), I had narrowed down a few options from which I would eventually choose my major. I had remembered that I always loved the ocean, so a career which evolved around the sea was a broad field and seemed to offer many choices...as long as it earned a good amount of money too.

I thought about Marine Biology; it's a "cool" field which certainly has it's level of ecological glamor when you see the dolphin trainers at Sea World and the dramatic whale rescues on CNN. What I came to realize about Marine Biology

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