As a teenager I wrote a long-term career plan: become a doctor, specialise in infectious diseases and volunteer for Doctors Without Borders. But after a few months as a medical student, I missed mathematics too much. I decided to replace long-term planning with the complete opposite: choosing based on what I wanted to do at the moment of choice. I switched to an undergraduate degree in mathematics and loved it all the way through.
Towards the end of my mathematics degree I decided I still wanted to learn more mathematics, so I applied to graduate school. I ended up in the US, at the MIT, where I met a lot of friends and my research area – symplectic geometry. Towards the end of my postgraduate degree I decided I still wanted to do more mathematics, so I applied for postdocs. That was the year of the deep financial crisis and there were few academic jobs to be had, and I had none. At the last minute, when I was ready to go and live with my parents and think about what to do next, a member of the administrative staff organised for me to stay another year at MIT, in a teaching role. I have much to thank her for; that year was very fruitful. I continued with research, started doing outreach, applied successfully for postdocs, and fell in love with a fellow mathematics graduate student, who is now my husband.
The next six years involved a lot of travelling: one year living 500km apart (he a graduate student at MIT, me a postdoc at Cornell), then two years 300km apart (he a postdoc at Princeton), then three years 100k apart (me a tenure-track at Fordham University). They also involved exciting mathematics with new collaborators, unusual teaching (Mathematics and Politics!), amazing places (New York City!), and inspiring outreach (teaching in prison!). There was also a lot of thinking, strategising, worrying, and hoping for two jobs in the same city.
In this regard, we were very fortunate, this is the beginning of the rest of our lives: we spent one very intense year at the University of Cambridge, expecting and welcoming a baby, and then moved to Edinburgh, where we both have jobs at the University of Edinburgh.
Looking back at my long-term plan from years ago, I ended up in a very different place. Maybe the closest I got is that volunteering turned into (far less heroic) outreach: leading mathematics circle sessions with children, teaching college mathematics at a prison, running workshops for mathematics teachers, giving public lectures to general audiences... and planning to continue adding to the list!