The Austin Woman team takes a trip back in time to talk about their childhood dreams.
Anne Cox
Production Coordinator
I didn’t have an exact career path carved out. In fact, I probably had about 17 different career paths that I wanted to take, and each one of them ended with superstardom. It didn’t matter how I got there: movie star, lead singer in a girl band, award-winning figure skater. You name it! I just wanted to get to wear pretty dresses and go to lots of parties, if we’re being honest. Which, funny enough, I get to do now with Austin Woman!
Allie Justis
Editorial Intern
For the longest time, I wanted to be a zookeeper because I grew up watching too much Animal Planet. I thought it would be my dream job and I talked about it all the time, so for my eighth birthday my mom had an animal handler bring some animals to our house for a petting zoo party. But as soon as I met the tarantulas and snakes like that in person, I knew that zookeeping wasn’t going to be for me. My dad took this picture of me when they brought out the pythons.
Parke Ballantine
Director of Events and Branding Strategy
Growing up I didn’t have much of an imagination around what I could be professionally, but I did really want to travel. I fell in love with the idea of freedom and being on the road, chance encounters while moving between towns and cities and learning more about the varieties of life. To date I have traveled mainly throughout the U.S., going on many road trips and living in six different states, although I have begun to travel to Europe now that I’m married to a German. I think little me would be thrilled.
Olivia Huntley
Marketing Sales Specialist
In junior kindergarten, I gave a report on dinosaurs, as one does. I was consumed with fascination about the plant-eating Apatosaurus and took it upon myself to become the 6-year-old expert on herbivorous late-Jurassic reptiles. I was going to be a paleontologist! I even had the round plastic-framed glasses to prove it. Long story short, I didn’t end up following in the footsteps of a scientist, but I still think dinosaurs are cool…and scrunchies came back in style. So it all worked out.
Dawn Weston
Publisher
I don’t think that I ever really had a strong draw to one career over another. Sure, I went through phases where when my interests changed, what I wanted to do changed. For a while it was a dancer. Then when I got a little older it was to own my own clothing store. To be honest when I enrolled in college, I started in a gen ed program where you didn’t have to declare a major till junior year. It was then that I declared my major in journalism with a specialization in advertising and marketing. My original goal was to be a top executive at an ad agency. Little did I know that the advertising sales position I took at the school newspaper my senior year would launch me into a career.
Cy White
Managing Editor
Despite growing up around music and being a lover of words, I declared at the mature age of 5 years old that I was going to be a doctor. Because I’d said it out loud and proclaimed it to everybody, that’s what I had to do. Period. No questions asked. The first and last time I strayed from that proclamation was in the summer between my freshman and sophomore years of undergrad when I both realized I wasn’t really passionate about it (just doing it because I thought I had to), and when I was almost kicked out of school for falling below the required GPA. I changed my mind real quick after that, finessed my way back into school and redirected my life’s direction to my actual passion: words.