Hello fellow Mustachians!
I'm about to graduate and still haven't decided what to do exactly with my life. The only thing I know for sure is that I want FI as soon as possible. Life is just one, and I am still undecided. I've wanted to be many things, and have researched many different options. First, I wanted to be a musician (I play the cello), then decided to be a psychologist, then decided to be an engineer, but I had my doubts and decided for finance. Later I wanted to be a doctor, but decided that an engineer would be better. However, then preferred that I wanted to be a nurse and then a physician assistant, but preferred to then just become an engineer again because it was less college. Now, I'm deciding between becoming an engineer or a teacher.
First, let me tell you about my priorities. My first priority is living a fulfilling life with tons of happiness, where I am married and have two or three children in the future and I have time to enjoy with my family. The key word here is time. For me, the most valuable and most precious thing I could buy would be time. That's why I want to be FI, and it became a goal to me that I can't get out of my head. I definitely don't want to work until 65 or more. At least not working because I need to eat, but because I want to and want to invest my time on it.
Of course, I want to work in something I like doing, in something that I enjoy and that could always do no matter what - in my passion. The problem? I don't have any specific passion, so I could become everything I want to and still like it. However, I've come to realize that many of my goals are related to education. For example, I love languages and I would love to teach someone to learn a language, teach the methods and the different approaches to learn a language. I would also love to teach social sciences, but I know I would not like to teach math. One of my problems is that I never got to love math, I like it and I find it interesting but that's it. For engineers, that's fundamental.
Now, to the point: I love education, I come from a family of teachers (my parents and siblings are/were teachers) and I’ve always thought I would be a great teacher and would like to help students succeed in life, giving them the right tools to face life. I have had teachers that have changed my life and I highly appreciate what they have done for me, and I would love to do the same. I think that would be a meaningful job that I would enjoy a lot.
However, I don’t feel the same for engineering. I feel it’s like meh. I might say I kind of like the idea of becoming an engineer and I think it would be cool. I like the fact that with just four years of education you could get a great salary, whereas for high school teachers that’s a different matter. Teachers are known to have a poor salary, and everybody would agree that a teacher could *never* be rich. Being a teacher has its ups and downs, but I am far more interested in becoming a teacher than an engineer. Another plus side is that you could have longer vacations, and that is really appealing for me that FIRE would take more time.
Now, becoming a teacher or an engineer is sort of a backup plan because my real interest is to create a website with great educational material that people would like to buy. That’s my goal, because it will give me passive income and at the same time it would help people. Examples like this exist everywhere, such as fluentin3months.com, scotthyoung.com, yoyochinese.com, duolingo.com or even treehouse.com. That’s my real goal. Now, that would require a lot of effort and dedication, and perhaps some luck. I’m working towards that goal and first I would like to teach people the right approach to learn a language. There are many people already doing it, but you could always contribute more. Then, we’ll see. I would try to do that when I’m in college and if I don’t success I will try doing that while working as a teacher/engineer, but as you see, the main goal is to educate people and earn passive income, because those are my main interests.
As for now, I'm working at a Burger King, and I don't like it but I need to do it. I plan to keep working until August, after that I think I would have saved like 2k. Then I’ll take out a 5k loan with a very small fixed interest rate that I would have for emergency; it counts as financial aid. After August I will still need to save $1500 every year, and my parents will help with the rest. Hopefully, I don’t expect to graduate with student loans. The reason why I need to work is because I’ve had a girlfriend for 3 years but she lives in Venezuela and I recently moved from there, we plan to marry once I became a citizen in 4 years. It’s tough but well worth it, the money saved will be spent on traveling to see each other and on whatever she needs to survive in Venezuela. I’m planning to still earn money by creating my own job, which would be something in the lines of being a language tutor/coach. I could already begin doing that for Spanish, but because many people here already know Spanish (I live in Miami) I could do the same for other languages (I’m conversational in French and Italian, with my method I believe I could become fluent in those languages really soon.) My goal for this summer is to become fluent in 3 languages and use that as a credential to become a language tutor/coach locally, and then expand to the Internet.
What do you think? Should I become an engineer or a teacher? I’m really sorry for the extremely long post, but I really need some advice. Thank you very much!