It's my junior year of college, which means I'm about to enter the so-called adult world. People keep asking me what I plan to do with my life, and when I tell them I don't really know for sure just yet, I don't often get the, "That's okay, you have plenty of time to figure it out," response that I used to get when I was a junior in high school. And each time people ask me the question, I get more anxious.
This mounting anxiety is why I made a goal at the beginning of the semester: to decide for sure what career I want by the end of the semester, have a list ready of grad schools to apply to, and do everything I could to get solid resume-building experience for that specific job. I was going to spend winter break content in the knowledge that I finally had it all figured out. But here I am, at the end of the semester, feeling as uncertain about my future as ever.
Over the past several years, I've researched tons of careers and considered many different ones. The list includes everything from journalist to paralegal to speech pathologist to lawyer to librarian to therapist to high school guidance counselor. There aren't many I've considered that I've since ruled out completely, but I'm also still not ready to commit to any one thing yet. And as much as the little voice in the back of my head might say otherwise, I'm starting to believe that maybe this is okay.
Now that I'm a Psychology major and that's unlikely to change at the very least because I would like to graduate sooner rather than later, my options are more limited than they once were. But they're still pretty broad, and I actually think that's kind of exciting.
So I'm going to spend the rest of my college career continuing to work for the best possible grades, getting more involved in clubs and organizations, trying different jobs, and learning more about my personal strengths and weaknesses. Hopefully, I'll have some kind of plan in place by graduation, but I'm learning to accept that while it's good to have goals, you can really only plan out your life so much.
So if you ask me what I want to do with the rest of my life, the long answer is that I'm thinking about several different things, and for all I know I might end up doing a couple or even all of them because most people change jobs several times anyway. The short answer is that I don't know. And I don't feel the need to freak out about it anymore.