I turned 21 recently. It was on a Saturday, and I spent the entire morning and half the afternoon at a seminar at a neighboring university in Nilai. The other half of the afternoon was spent replying to birthday messages and napping, while I spent the night watching football alone at a mamak shop.
It seems to be a sort of custom with some people in that turning 21 is a grand occasion and is deserving of huge celebrations. 21 is the age where you finally attain your freedom and can finally make your own decisions, apparently.
Without going too much into what other people think of birthdays, celebrations aren't really my thing. I've been thrown a couple of surprise parties before and, while I appreciated the gesture, I really had no idea what I was supposed to do when faced with such a situation. I'd much rather people didn't go through all that trouble just to celebrate something I'm not really fussed about anyway.
Reaching this age, though, served as a reminder that time is, in fact, moving steadily along, instead of creeping slowly across the ground as the slow pace of the early days of the current semester might have fooled me into believing. That, in turn, served to remind me that I have some big decisions I need to make about my future.
One of those decisions concerns my future career path. As a student of Actuarial Finance, and one who is doing well enough as far as CGPA is concerned, I'm mostly expected to continue along the actuarial line - intern at some multinational insurance company, take a few papers, and eventually become a full-fledged actuary.
To be honest, though, my heart probably hasn't really been in that for a long, long time. I've been giving it a lot of thought lately, and I've finally decided that becoming an actuary isn't the right choice for me. Frankly speaking, I've always enjoyed the Finance component of Actuarial Finance more than the Actuarial, and that's where I see myself now. I have a new dream, and it's to work in the finance industry.
Besides that, something else I've been thinking about is marriage. I'm not saying that I want to get married right now, but surely it's coming to the time where I need to start planning. I'll be graduating soon, and after that I'll start earning my own income - sooner or later I'm gonna have to get married, and I'm gonna need to be financially sound enough for that.
Some people want to build their careers first before they even begin to think about getting married, while some don't even want to get married at all. I respect their choices, but I'm firmly in the (relatively) early marriage camp. I'm a family person, and I just think that having one of my own would provide me with a strong support system to get me through life's challenges. A wife and kids shouldn't be a hindrance to you living a good, successful life - they should instead be motivating and inspiring you to work hard towards one.
I feel myself growing all the time, and thinking about such things as well as finally having the strength to decide on them only provides further evidence for that. There's no guarantee that things will turn out as planned, but at least now I have a plan. Let's just see where this road takes me.
