Welcome...Life Goals.

I started this blog for a couple of different reasons. First, I feel like I get dumber with each passing day as my graduation from Wake Forest moves further away into the distance. Instead of honing on my writing skills, I feel like they are slowly slipping past me and I know that the fact that people could potentially be viewing what I write will serve as a motivator to perfect my sentence structure and my word choice, as well as to make my explanations more elaborate and coherent (as opposed to my verbal stories which seem to branch off into ten different directions).

The other main reason I am now writing publicly is because I am horrible at talking to my parents on a regular basis and they deserve to see and hear into some of my inner thoughts since they don't have the luxury of being within driving distance to their youngest daughter. Finally, more and more of my friends and family seem to be all over the country, and even the world with two of my closest friends in Sweden and in London. Hopefully I can still feel connected to them via this route.

With that said, my first topic was discovered while I was lying in bed this past weekend at 1:23am. I realized that this is the first time in my life in which my next goals are not going to be just thrown at me by outside sources.

To elaborate, in eighth grade, it was a given that I was going to enter high school and join the cross country and track team. I pursued honors courses and did not really do anything else besides run and do homework. I had the final goal in sight the first day of freshman year: to get out of Carbondale, Illinois and go to a college that was not within a day's driving distance to my hometown. I knew that I would develop so many important life skills by learning how to make new friends and find myself completely independent of my parents and everything else that I had known. Clearly, the next goal in life was also a given: graduate high school and go to college.

Once I got to college, the goals were handed to me again. My coach told me what times to achieve and gave me the workouts to help me do that. My professors gave me homework with the expectation that I would complete it. Needless to say, I completed all the steps that would allow me to graduate and then suddenly I was thrown into the real world, with no one there anymore to tell me what the next steps were. At that very instant, I became the luminary of my life, with sole ownership and responsibility for my future life path.

This got me to thinking that I better start writing down some goals before I get to my life five years from now and think "I have no direction, no goals, and have not moved forward at all with my own development since I graduated. Eek!" That scares me, so I obviously am beginning to take the necessary steps by acknowledging it is time to take charge.

With that long explanation, I've split my goals into three different categories of what is most important in my life right now: career goals, running goals, and personal goals. These goals are oriented for my four year future life path. I figured that since my life before this was split into four-year segments, I might as well keep it at that.



Running Goals
1. Sub 18 min 5k road race
2. Sub 1:20 Half Marathon 2010
3. Focused diet and nutrition to keep iron levels at a maximum level.
4. Run sub 3 hr marathon debut 2014

Personal Goals
1. Read at least 12 books a year (would be fantastic if i could get 24!).
2. Take a digital photography class.
3. Take a class at local community college that interests me, to keep me feeling intellectually stimulated.
4. Travel somewhere exotic and see the world.
5. Enjoy my time living with John and continue to build stronger relationships in my "for now" home of Charlotte
6. Move to California whether for school or job by the time I am 25 years old. Target of 2011. It is a goal to live near my sister at some point during my life.
**Personal goals are dependent on how much time I have outside of work and how much I dedicate to volunteer activities**

Career Goals
1. Increased participation in Charlotte Running Club as Vice President.
2. Become a bigger player at the Charlotte Flights Youth Track Club. Make relationships with Coaches, Parents, and Athletes.
3. Work on current team at Bank of America for one more year, get a new title of Change Consultant 2009-2010
4. Find a new role in Marketing at BOA in either Bank of America Marathon role or as a marketing associate for the Olympics. 2010/2011
5. Summer 2011/2012: Application Essays for MBA school for entrance in Fall 2011. Top Schools: Stanford, Northwestern, UCLA, Texas, UC Davis, UNC
6. Study for MBA to improve test score to above 700. Target test date Summer 2011

That's all I've got for now, but any feedback is completely welcome. I have always been an advocate for constructive criticism, so speak your mind!

Caitlin