"Journey into Information Architecture" by Thom Haller

I wasn’t born an information architect. I couldn’t even figure out what I was going to do when I grew up.

I thought, somehow, a career would materialize in a dream—that I would wake one morning and say, “I’m going to be a management trainee!” I felt it was only a matter of time before I would don a dark suit, surround myself with facts and figures, and hammer out business decisions that were good for the organization.

But this urge never struck. Instead, I took job inventory tests and wrote descriptions of classes I liked and didn’t like.

My career advisor returned one book-length inventory with the comment, “Excellent inventory, but obviously you don’t know what you are going to do.” By the time I completed college and graduate school, I decided I had failed at the ONE THING I was supposed to get out of my education: I still didn’t know what I wanted to do when I grew up.

Nonetheless, armed with an education and a desire to do … well … something, I packed my 1977 yellow Hornet hatchback and headed for Washington, D.C., where I found a dumping ground for people like me—college graduates who didn’t know what they wanted to do when they grow up. ...

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