Jimmy Simpson for BI
For most of his youth, Bryan wanted to be an astrophysicist.
He was obsessed with the Hubble telescope, and his bedroom ceiling was dotted with plastic glow-in-the-dark stars. When the Scholastic Book Fair came to his library, he'd beg his parents for cash to buy NASA photo books. To him, space science seemed the pinnacle of innovation, excitement, and existentialism.
So when, as a sophomore in college, he told his parents he was going to major in accounting, they gave him what Bryan (which isn't his real name) could describe only as "a look."
"An accountant?" he remembers his mother saying. "Why would you want to be an accountant?"