There are hundreds of careers in Art for a student to choose from. If you are passionate about your work you will be successful and make a very good living from it. No one told me that in high school. I was left with right-brain choices that my parents recommended such as Accounting and Engineering. Unfortunately, those were the days when, if you did not know what you wanted to be, you were likely to get drafted and sent off to war. I was. I spent two years and three months in Vietnam as a photographer. That changed me dramatically because it was then that, for the first time, I knew what I wanted to be. That simple selection of a life goal is life changing. I graduated from Art Center College of Design in 1974 and for 25 years I was an advertising photographer with studios in Chicago and Dallas. I had a terrific and successful career as an Advertising photographer and when the digital imaging age came with the onset of the Adobe Photoshop program I was there at the beginning to embrace it. It was a time when all of us were learning the limitless possibilities of the digital world and with computers that had very little and very expensive RAM memory. I lost one very big job when a client told me I could not possibly do the assignment even as I showed her transparencies that proved I could. We had gone through a technology door that changed the game exponentially. It was a learning curve for everyone and we all had to adapt in our own way or be left behind. Now those ideas and those days seem primitive as will the next generation of technology looking back on the present. Ten years ago I decided to teach. I wanted specifically to teach high school and not college. I wanted to bring the message of the possibilities of a career in an art-related field to students who are just making up their minds about career goals. There are plenty of frustrated right-brained students out there who do not like Math or Science and feel life has very limited possibilities for them. I have seen them in my classes thousands of times. I have had students come to my classes thinking they cannot be designers because they can’t draw. In a few weeks they find they love digital imaging and want to be designers. On this web site I have posted a number of images that reflect my work over the years. There are many images that were lost as I moved in 2000 and I am the less for that. But the selection here is a good mark of what I liked to do most. In doing so, I have been able to reflect on my career and find that what I am doing now, teaching, is the greatest and most rewarding thing I have ever done. Unless you have taught in the classroom, you will probably not understand that. I wake up every morning looking forward to going to school. It makes me young and I honestly enjoy watching the young men and women in my classes grow, with the knowledge and learning we give them, from children to adults. One teacher asked me several years ago if the honeymoon (my love for teaching) was still continuing. “Yes, Paola, it is.”   Bill Diebold