I quit today. I handed in my letter of resignation this afternoon to the owner of the company, who was supportive of my decision. I’m leaving the field of IT. I’m headed back to school to become something else. Currently, my eye is set on becoming a registered dietitian. I hope I make it. It’s a 4-year degree, resulting in a B.S. from the College of Tropical Agriculture and Human Resources at the University of Hawaii at Manoa. This will be my 2nd Bachelor’s degree.

This was not an easy decision. It took years for me to realize what career I thought I’d like to be in, since IT wasn’t doing it for me, and I only really came into this realization this summer. I’ve worked in IT for 7.5 years now, and I can’t see myself enjoying it any more than I do now. It was never a passion I had. Just an ability I was able to demonstrate, and my goggle-skills and most-likely my background as an ICS student helped out when it comes to server administration, understanding how applications connect to databases, and configurations, logs, etc. Server work was my favorite part of IT. I found networking boring. Desktop was also cool, and I started in a help desk in my very first IT job, at Hawaii Pacific Health, serving thousands of employees. My current company was awesome enough to believe in me and give me a chance to come from a help desk environment to a server technician job. My job title has changed to fit various contracts, so I’m currently a System Analyst. Our company develops software for the DoD and I do the installs and first-line tech support. Somehow this ended up with me also doing a lot of oracle support as well which I didn’t mind in a crazy way.

I did enjoy having my own in-house test servers, and performing updates and experimenting with them, but in my spare time, I’ve never cared to learn about IT the way I do nutrition. I hate being on-call 24/7, and in IT it happens. I also miss working with people like I did when I was younger. I pride myself on great customer service skills, and I almost never meet people anymore in my work.

This is a big decision which will cost me money, but I want to go into dietetics and help people enhance the quality / duration of their lives. I think this would be fulfilling to me, and I’m looking forward to the challenges ahead. I avoided math and science the first time I was in college, (I graduated with a BBA in MIS), but this time, I’m looking forward to it, and want to learn and see the world from yet another vantage point.

I avoided the medical field because my father was sick from the time I was thirteen, and I felt hospitals and doctors were all big business and cold, and somewhat evil at times… it felt like we were put through the wringer, and social workers were always asking us how we were going to pay and not the least bit concerned with our emotional well-being. We thought we’d lose our home. I was so leery of the medical profession as a result of this, (and some other horrible things that happened to my father during his times spent in the hospitals). And, I shied from the medical field… but after losing both my parents… I’m realizing I am willing to enter the medical field, and I want to help people. If I can somehow add comfort to a sick person’s life, or help them get off medication… I want to do that!

I think this new career is far more inline with my passions and my personality. I will always be grateful for the time I had in IT, since it will only add to my experiences and help me to harness what I can from technology, no matter where I end up. I have anxiety. Some mornings, I wake up at 3 or 4 o’clock in the morning, and question myself… other times I wake up happy and sure I’m doing the right thing.

Though I may fail at my new objective, I can only give it my best shot and keep moving forward.