Entering week three of the quarter system, I am beginning to feel a sense of impending doom as midterms sneak up, and paper deadlines are now in clear sight. Like most of my peers, I’ve had a mid-college life crisis (more like every-month-in-college life crisis), about what my future looks like, what my profession is going to be, where am I going to live, is graduate school something I want do, and so on. This is normal.
But what I think isn’t normal is this idea that at the young ages of 18-21 we are supposed to pick our one thing, our one major, one career, one path. I’ve never really been opposed to this idea until I sat down to truly think about it.
I personally believe that human beings are not programmed to be doing one thing for their whole life. This is why we see so many people in their 40’s finally at their dream jobs, not someone at their dream job right out of college. I think it takes awhile to really find what we are good at, and have that be something we really love. This is why we see so many people switch careers mid-way through their life.
I do believe some people really do know what they want to do, and will start doing it immediately after they graduate and will die doing that one career, and will have lived a fulfilled life. But, on the flip side, I see an issue with this idea that we have to pick “one path”.
By emphasizing this idea of picking a major, and then picking one job, and ultimately picking one career, it excludes everything else you might be interested in. Human beings are not just interested in one thing, we are always changing, always evolving, and with that our interests grow and change. Think back to over the years of what you wanted to be when you grew up.
When I was six, I wanted to be a makeup artist.
When I was 12, I wanted to be a geneticist (don’t ask).
When I was 17, I wanted to be a writer.
When I was 18, I wanted to be a magazine editor.
And now, at 19, I want to be a big time book editor and publisher.
In 13 years, I’ve wanted to do five different things. I guarantee that when I am 21 and graduated, I will probably be on track for doing something else.
It’s a frightening idea to think that I may graduate intending to do one thing with my life, only to later find out that this is not what I want to do, that my interests have shifted and my passions reside somewhere else.
It’s frightening, but so normal. I’m not saying let’s get rid of the whole picking a major, having career plans, figuring out your life concept, but I think we need to shift perspective in a way that gets rid of the idea that if you pick X major, then you will do this career, and your life will look like this.
We are a community of people with many interests, some very contradicting interests such as art and science, and we shouldn’t feel like we have to give up one to do the other.
By choosing one path, we forget about the other things in life that we enjoy, and if we lose those, we ultimately lose ourselves.
We need to stop thinking that what we do and learn in college is going to be what our life is going to be like permanently, instead let’s take in stride our constant ebb and flow as human beings, and no longer be afraid to follow the passions that we have deep inside ourselves, even if these means taking a different path than your original one.
