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community to have…
• Good parks?
• Bike paths, walking/hiking trails?
• Community sports leagues and facilities?
Commuting
What is important to you…
• Commute by car?
• Ability to take mass transit to work?
• Being able to walk or bike to work?
Write the answers to these questions about Your Ideal Community on small slips of paper or sticky notes and put them in order of their importance to you. Then select the top five characteristics and write them in the My Ideal Community section of My Parachute .
* The categories and items on this list are not your only choices. We hope that these suggestions will stimulate additional ideas about what makes a community an ideal one for you. You can also get great ideas by using the categories to brainstorm with a group of friends.

4
    Putting the Pieces Together
    IDENTIFYING YOUR POTENTIAL DREAM JOBS
    Are you ready for the next step? In this chapter you’ll finish filling out the My Parachute diagram and begin to identify your potential dream jobs. All the hard work you did in the previous three chapters has produced the pieces of your career puzzle. As you begin to identify potential dream jobs (or fields in which you are likely to find your dream job), you’ll begin to see the pieces come together to form new possibilities and directions for further exploration.
    Though it can be tempting, we encourage you not to narrow your options for your dream job too quickly—that is, don’t lock yourself into a particular job title without looking at all the possibilities. In general, we humans are more comfortable with labels than lists. It’s certainly easier to talk about job titles than to give someone a list of skills that you like and want to use. But if you focus on a job title too soon, before investigating several jobs that might use similar skills, you may not learn about work that could be a better match for your best skills and favorite interests—in other words, you just might pass your dream job by.
    If you didn’t have your parachute, the process of finding your dream job would be much harder. As you know, it’s very hard to find something when youdon’t know what you’re looking for! That’s why your parachute is so important. The information that you’ve gathered from your Parachute will help you recognize your dream job when you come across it.

Finding Your Field of Interest
    A good job for you will use most of yourfavorite interests and skills. Turn to My Parachute and take a look at My Favorite Interests. What did you write there? Sometimes the process of finding your dream job, or potential dream job, involves a little “translation”—by which we mean taking your favorite interests and determining the occupational field in which they fit. Sometimes thefields are much broader or much more numerous than you realize at first.

I wish I would have known that there were opportunities to earn a comfortable living much closer to the types of dreams and interests that I had in high school. I was an avid lover of maps back then. Had I known that being a cartographer was an available career, I would have fervently pursued it.
—ADAM HOVERMAN, DO, family practice physician, age 30

    If one of your interests is skateboarding, your fields might be athletics, recreation, or kinesiology (the study of the principles of mechanics and anatomy in relation to human movement). If you choose the field of athletics, you might become a skateboarding coach; if recreation, you might become involved with designing a skateboard park or program for skateboarders; if kinesiology, you might design skateboards that are easier and safer to use, and also more flexible for doing various maneuvers. In each case, your training and education (for example, choice of training or college majors) would vary.
    Here’s another example. One of Tamara’s interests is medicine. Because her best skills involve taking care of sick or injured people, she wants to be a nurse. But there are