Becoming an astronaut is a popular career aspiration for children, but Kim said he didn’t have a dream job until he turned 16 and was drawn to serving in the Navy.
“As a kid, I did not have really any dreams until I was 16 years old, and I heard about Naval Special Warfare and the kinds of things that Naval Special Warfare operators do,” Kim said in an interview with the peer-reviewed journal Annals of Emergency Medicine.
“That was really the first time, when I was 16, that I actually had a vision and a dream and felt that I was called to do something,” he continued. “I never once thought I could be a physician, or an astronaut, or anything else.”
When Kim, a Korean-American born to immigrant parents, told his mother about his decision to enlist, he said she tearfully urged him to reconsider.
“My mother, with tears in her eyes, [said], ‘It’s not too late; you can come home, and we’ll do this family business,'” Kim told Business Insider in 2020. “And for a fleeting moment, I considered it.”
But Kim said, “There wasn’t anyone or anything to talk me out of it. It was the first time I set my sights on a dream.”
