I have a dream. I dream that one day I will finish my graduation and then naturally enter and finish a master’s degree.

As far as I can remember, it was Martin Luther King who said that, or was it a bit different? Anyway, that was my dream. I had a bunch of great teachers in my life, that kind of professional that not only teaches you, but inspires your life in general, that cares about his/her students and tries to teach expecting you to be a better person (and most of the times accomplishing this). Considering this background and the way I (like to believe to) am, it isn’t surprising I wanted to get a master’s degree, to know a lot about a specific area and to be allowed to teach someone, to try to make a student’s life a bit better.

Well, things didn’t quite happen the way I’ve planned when I was 15 (and does it ever do?). Last year I found myself about to finish graduation and with an amazing master’s degree just around the corner. Without thinking too much, I took the qualification test, made it, and suddenly I had classes beginning in a couple of months. I was incredible happy, never thought I would pass the test or that any teacher there would support and help me, but I was in. Half (ok, maybe not that much) of the former dream was completed, I didn’t bother if the classes were in the morning or if this could affect my productivity at work (and believe me, it was a time when I really didn’t want to decrease productivity), I was in and I’d make everything for this to happen properly.

So it all began, and a couple of weeks later I decided to leave.

I went to the classes and I was amazed about how cool all that was, with a lot of great people of different areas willing to pass their knowledge to you. I used to go to classes in the morning, have a quick lunch and work until 9pm to accomplish the tasks I didn’t do in the morning. Despite that, I was seeing myself a bit closer to that initial dream, until the time I realized that maybe being a teacher does not necessarily mean getting a master’s degree. I realized that I was investing time and efforts in Academic area, which means that I’d need to do a lot of things almost meaningless to companies (I love to work with my buddies).

While I don’t really want to follow the Academic path (at least this is the way I think while I’m writing this, we never know), and my dream was/is mostly related to teach something nice and doing a little good to someone’s life, the point is: at that time, I put effort and time to follow a direction a lot farther than the one I wanted to reach and realized that I could achieve what’s needed to be a (good) teacher in other ways, learning different things and technologies by myself, studying at home, giving talks, workshops, attending to events. Don’t get me wrong, the environment there is outstanding, but my objectives now are a bit different than this path.

I believe the important here is that sometimes we don’t exactly know what we want, and to try things is probably the best way to stop and think with more information to, perhaps, change our current course. Let us not be afraid of changes or what other people will say, if even we don’t know our own objectives sometimes, how can other people do?