inadequate career counseling.

I like my job.  I'm a software engineer.  I've been either in development or quality assurance for the past 15 years.  I keep going from one to the other.  Right now I'm in QA, but mostly writing code.

It's a good fit for me.  It's creative, challenging, educational, and satisfying.

I stumbled into this line of work.

Computer engineer was not a path suggested to me in high school career counseling.  The idea that computers would be a viable career hadn't been accepted yet. And would probably not have been recommended to a girl, anyway.

But there were a lot of other things that weren't offered to me in career counseling.

I didn't know that Linguistics was a profession.  That might have been cool. I did well in Spanish class.  But I didn't even know the job existed.

I didn't know that I could have become an archaeologist, a museum curator, a genealogist. Maybe I could have been a private investigator, or a spy for the CIA. (No, too nervous.) 

Writer was suggested, since my Dad was a writer.  But I knew I didn't want to be a free-lance writer.
The pay was sporadic at best.  I knew I couldn't live like that.

The only jobs my school counselor suggested were doctor, lawyer, or teacher.  Things might have been different if I had been aware of all the options there were.

I don't know if she saw no potential in me, or if she lacked imagination.  Did living in the middle of Iowa corn country seem to limit my options?  We're talking 1972, so maybe she thought my true calling was simply wife and mother?

That said, I haven't suffered from the oversight.  I've had an interesting life with a variety of jobs and it has brought me here to a happy place.

Still, there is a little bit of me that says, What if I had known about that?  Where would I be now?  Would I be just as happy?

Why didn't someone tell me?