By the time college rolls around most people have given at least some thought as to what they want to do with their lives. It's a question that starts getting asked when you're as young as six years old: what do you want to be when you grow up?
At that age most of us have visions of becoming something like a doctor or a teacher. The really cool and exciting kids wanted to be astronauts or lion tamers, but most kids end up with careers that they can't even imagine. When was the last time you heard a six year old tell you that they want to grow up to be a CPA or work in some company's HR department?
The point is that the answer to that question: "what do you want to be when you grow up?" can change. And for some people it never stops changing. Unfortunately, most college freshmen have this idea in their heads that they need to have the answer to this question figured out right now because your major automatically equals your career. People will tell you that that's not always the case, but I know I didn't really believe them. As an English major I always sort of envied the pre-med students or the engineering students. It wasn't that I had any desire whatsoever to devote my life to the study of biology or physics or whatever it is those science kids do, but at least they had a clear path laid out before them. You want to be a doctor? Here you go here are the steps you have to take and the classes to enroll and the schools to apply to. The path of a humanities major is considerably more complicated.
Growing up I always had the dream that I would grow up and become a best-selling novelist. As I got older I realized that that's not a very practical career plan and that very few people actually make a good living off of writing. So unless I was going to become the next J. K. Rowling or Stephen King I would have to come up with a back-up plan. As any English major will tell you, the first question anyone asks you after they find out you're an English major is "oh, do you want to teach?" So I decided that I might as well do that since that seems to be what English majors do. However, I didn't have any desire to teach high school so I decided to become an English professor.
As it turns out this is one of the worst career decisions someone can make right now. It includes years of hard work, going into debt and most likely never having a stable job. At least doctors are pretty much guaranteed a stable income after sacrificing a decade of their adult lives. So I moved onto the next idea. Publishing.
That's a respectful and reasonable career path right? I'd get to pursue my passion for literature and use my writing skills to edit other people's works. Sounds great. Well apparently this is second worst career path because apparently it is almost as impossible to be hired as a full time editor at a publishing house as it is to become a tenured professor.
So with all my career plans crushed I felt like I was back to square one. That was until I finally got some good news for English majors everywhere with aspirations other than teaching. Because, while full-time editors might soon be a thing of the past, full-time content creators are in high demand. The entire time I was trying to plan for a career that wouldn't include writing full time I was missing out on the career path that would be both practical and fulfilling.
This crazy roller coaster of career planning all took place within a year of my undergraduate schooling, so I can't even imagine what it will be like once I'm actually entrenched in job-hunting and start working at my first real job. What I'm starting to learn is that most of us will be lots of things when we grow up. The path to a fulfilling and lucrative career is not a straight one. More importantly though, sometimes choosing what might be more practical over what you think will make you happy is the completely wrong choice for you.
If you take one thing away from this article I want it to be that life is long and full of possibilities. What you do in college and even right after college is not necessarily what you'll end up being when you grow up.
