Ever since high school, there has been this expectation that after you graduate, you’re going to have a good idea of what you’re doing. There may be people around you who have five year plans and they know each step they’re going to be taking from now on. But a lot of the times, that’s just not the case. After I graduated high school, I went through confusion and ended up attending a college that just wasn’t the right fit for me. During that time, I felt like I was even more of a mess: not only did I not have a clear idea about what I was going to be doing in my future career, I couldn’t even figure out what I was doing in my everyday life. Nothing really felt right, and that caused me to panic.
Eventually, I made the decision to change the college that I was attending and that helped me figure out how to sort out my everyday life. I felt like I was fitting in and was in an environment in which I could flourish academically. Unfortunately, this change did nothing to help figure out my worries about my future. So there I was, starting out my sophomore year of college, and I still didn’t really have a clue what my future was supposed to look like.
Sure, I had a very general idea of what I wanted to do and that was to become a cosmetic chemist. As a result, I was studying chemistry because that’s the most obvious choice of major for that line of work. It became hard, though, when I had friends telling me their yearlong plans of the different programs they were going to get involved in and study with in order to gain experience and make headway in their chosen career paths and I had absolutely no clue what I was doing.
In the future, I do plan on using resources that I have such as career services to help guide me down the path that I need to go on in order to get where I want to be, but I think the most important thing is that I’ve come to terms with the idea that I don’t really know what I’m doing right now. Although it would be nice to have a completely structured five year plan for what I’m going to be doing from now on, for now, I’m just going to focus on getting my degree. And although I’ll be making efforts to make sure I can gain some experience or get a clearer idea of what to do, I know that things will fall into place eventually. And when that day comes, I’ll look back and wonder why I was ever worried.
