It was a case of fourth-time lucky, as I am (or was) a three-time university drop-out. To manage to make the degree I finally got a Master's felt a little like I'd hacked the system, but more importantly, I felt vindicated in my strongly held belief that it's OK not to know what you want to be when you grow up until well after you've become a grown-up.

Though I can't speak for today's youth (at 35 and as a teacher I'm now officially allowed to use that term), when I was a teen, the pressure to know what you wanted to be when you "grew up" was ever present. You had to have an idea of your VCE subjects in year 9, choose said subjects according to the university degree you'd study straight out of school, and then fly smoothly into your chosen career upon graduation.

This was a walk in the park for many of my peers, who'd known from a young age that it was their destiny to become a lawyer, doctor, physical therapist or teacher. I, on the other hand, was cursed with the sort of scattershot gifted ("gifted") mind that jumped from dream job to dream job. When I chose my uni preferences, fashion design seemed like a good fit because, well, I was into fashion design at the time. What could possibly go wrong?!

The reality of the course was significantly different, especially for someone whose sewing skills could generously be described as "experimental". My two sad years of a fashion design BA set me on a tortuous journey, via a couple of aborted TAFE courses, towards eventually working out what I actually wanted to do with my life around the age of 30: screenwriting.

Ironically enough, screenwriting was what I'd put in my "In 20 years time…" section of the yearbook back in 1999, but it took me a long time to get back to that place, and to decipher that the wistful feeling I got in cinemas wasn't, in fact, about wanting to be a movie-star or SFX makeup artist.