How I chose my education, part 3

Today, I am going to share the final part of how I chose my education.
While I am usually not comfortable writing on my blog, I have enjoyed this a lot.
Especially the comments have been heartwarming!

And if you have a life story like this, I would love to read it.
Feel free to post a link in the comments so we can all enjoy it 🙂

I ended part 2 with receiving that mysterious text messages, though I had pretty much guessed the person behind it (we named him “B”).
But this was only confirmed a few years later.

The message gave me the confidence boost to finally transfer to my childhood passion and study Electrical Engineering.
And secretly, I hoped I could get to know B a bit better.

But confusingly enough, I hardly ever saw him in class!
It turned out that his reason for visiting the dean was to inform the school that he wanted to squeeze the 4 years of education into 3 years.
He already had some years of work experience in this field, so he felt confident enough to able to achieve this.
But it did mean that he took different and more classes than the rest of us.

So, I started my course of Electrical Engineering and finally got that title “prettiest girl in class”.
But sadly, I was also the only female 😉

What I notice in books is that whenever a woman works in a “man’s field”, she is the best of them all.
I don’t understand why we have to put this pressure on women.
I would love to say I was the star student, but that would be lying.
I was nothing more or less than average.

The one thing where I did differ from my classmates was that I took a leap of faith and decided to do my internship abroad.
I became very interested in the Wind Power business and Denmark pretty much gave birth to Wind Turbines.

I moved to a small town of about 7000 inhabitants, but the firm was large and took on people from all over the world.
Most of the foreigners would start out by living in the only hostel of the town.
So I did too.
A whole new world opened up to me.
I had my own room and bathroom, but the kitchen and living area were shared. So you couldn’t really avoid each other.
I could probably fill a book of the things that happened at that hostel! 😄

Within that year of living in Denmark, I did my internship and wrote my dissertation, which meant that I was finally graduated!
I already secured a job in the same firm and was happy to get back to that hostel in Denmark!

I never intended to stay there for 4 years, but somehow time passed by.

During my 2nd year there, I suddenly got a text from the same mysterious number as a few years before.

I need to pick up a plane in Denmark and I heard through the grapevine that you’re there? 😉

“Pick up a plane” sounds like a bad excuse to meet up with someone, but I actually remembered he told me once that he flies small planes.
I agreed to be his guide for the weekend.

This could have been the beginning of a love story, but life isn’t necessarily a fairy tale.

He arrived in his car and a day later we went on a road trip.
Unfortunately, I don’t handle car drives very well and ended up vomiting all over his brand new car.
Oops!

He wasn’t angry, but he wasn’t amused either.
I obviously offered to pay for the cleaning of the car, but he still had to drive back for 8 hours with a not very pleasant smell.

At the end, I think we both knew that we wouldn’t see each other again.
Not necessarily because of my car sickness, but we both developed different lifestyles over the years and it just didn’t seem to fit.
But I had to know how he got my number and why he texted me all those years ago.

He told me that he saw how much I wanted to make the switch, but felt too insecure about it.
He was convinced that all I needed was a random stranger who believed in me, so he convinced the dean to give him my number.

Hah.

As expected, we didn’t stay in touch.
But I think he played a big part in shaping my future.

Being an Engineer landed me a good job, which enabled me to work in several countries, which lead me to meeting the actual love of my life, who supported me when I wanted to make a career switch to a Children’s Book Illustrator after a burn out.

I usually try to avoid searching for meanings behind life events, but I can’t help but thinking “What if I didn’t knock on the dean’s office at that exact moment?”.
What if B never sent me that text?
Would I have still ended up where I am now?

Anyhow….
I hope you found this little story and the drawings amusing!
And feel free to share any life events that are significant to you!

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