Choosing teaching as a career includes many different factors, reasons and parameters. These factors can vary in time by the changes in the culture, politics, or society. Teachers and their reasons about why they chose teaching as a career have been an important issue for researchers. Many researches have been done to understand the reasons of the student teachers to choose this profession. This study, in this sense, investigates the career motivations and career perceptions of student teachers in relation to their gender and grade. The participants were 48 first-year and 54 fourth-year students (totally 104) in a teacher preparation program at a state university, in Turkey. The study adopted a quantitative approach by using a scale. The data were collected in 2018-2019 academic year. The results suggested that both the first and the fourth-year students were mostly motivated by altruistic reasons and their prior teaching and learning experiences. Both male and female participants had no significant differences related to the motivational factors to become a teacher. The study also asserted that the satisfaction with the choice of teaching was predicted mostly by intrinsic career values, altruistic reasons and lastly task return (salary and status). The result were discussed in line with current studies in the literature.