Not to derail, but if anyone actually cares...
Sports were such a big deal in my hometown that I always thought I was going to do something in that field. Once I finally realized I wasn't going to be a 6'5" professional athlete, though, I thought about getting into shoe design - trying to work for Nike - since I was obsessed with Nike growing up and was a pretty good artist, but ultimately I just didn't have the passion for it. So, at that point, I had no idea what I wanted to do (and this is where it gets somewhat embarrassing) until one night, Christmas break '97, my high school buddies and I were illegally buying beer at 7-Eleven, across the street from the mall/movie theater, when a friend of ours and her boyfriend were walking in as we were walking out, mascara running down her face, still crying from something. I asked her what was wrong, and between sobs she said, "We just saw Titanic!" I had never seen someone cry like that from a movie before, which really piqued my interest. So the next night a group of us went to see Titanic as well - this was at the height of the craze - and afterward, as the lights came up, I remember how silent and somber the packed theater was, save for all the sniffling, and as we were walking out it hit me like a bolt of lightning that I wanted to be the one responsible for that feeling. Not necessarily the crying, but stirring some kind of emotional response in an audience. I just had no idea how, or what, in the industry, I wanted to be.
A couple days later, I randomly discovered Ain't It Cool News (it was listed as "The Best of Bytes" in a year-end People Magazine my parents had), and became instantly obsessed with online movie news. Then, a couple weeks after that, a three-paragraph synopsis for the upcoming, Nicolas Cage-starring Superman Lives dropped. I had a friend who was a huge Superman fan (he wore a sleeveless Superman t-shirt with the "S" on it under his football jersey on game days, and his AOL screen name was "Jor-El"), I wanted him to read the synopsis, but I had no idea copy and paste was even a thing back then. I didn't know I could just send him the link, and I sure as hell didn't know I could copy and paste the synopsis into a word document and print it out. So I literally wrote the synopsis down in one of my spiral notebooks for school, and as I was writing I was filling in the gaps in my head, thinking, "It would be cool if…" and then it him me - maybe *this* is what I want to do… write. A couple weeks after that (February '98), Good Will Hunting finally hit our theater, it absolutely blew me away - I had never seen an "indie" before - then a few weeks after that Damon & Affleck won the Oscar for Best Original Screenplay, and in that moment I knew for sure that's exactly what I wanted to do.
So, one part Titanic, one part Superman, and one part Good Will Hunting is basically what jump-started my passion, over a three-month period or so late in high school.
That said, I was still kind of embarrassed to admit that I wanted to go into the "the arts," and my entire family (all the way back three generations) went to A&M, so that's what I did as well. But, as we all know, that was probably the last place on Earth I should have been to try and become a filmmaker. So, I got a little disgruntled and depressed in my situation, and my grades suffered, to the point where I couldn't transfer out. Thankfully, my sophomore year, a family friend hooked me up with a job working for the video lab in the athletic department, where I got to work for the football team (and do my "sports" thing) while also getting to edit highlight videos, shoot commercials, etc (and do my "movie" thing), which I could not have loved more. Then, a year or two into that, I was taking a Studies in Black Film class - the only film class offered at A&M that semester - and a guy who worked on film sets in Hollywood, doing video playback for directors, came and spoke to the class (he was a graduate of A&M). At the end of the class, he offhandedly mentioned that he could set any of us up with an internship at a production company in LA if we wanted, and I was the only one to raise my hand and take him up on the offer. Didn't think twice. I met him for drinks that night at Fox & Hound, he vetted me a bit, and then a couple days later made the introduction via email to a production company he frequently worked with, on the Sony lot. I moved to LA for that summer, fell in love with it, met a ton of awesome people - some of my best friends still to this day - impressed the production company enough that they invited me back when I graduated, and from there I was on my way.
Something to investigate tonight. 
