I’m currently a rising junior and I will fill you in on a little secret - I have no idea what I want to do with my life. I spend time convincing myself I have finally found the perfect career path or major and that now all of the stress will be gone, but about a month later, I always feel like I am back to square one. For the longest time, I thought that I HAD to have it all figured out. I was certain that if I didn’t know what I was doing, I was wasting my time in college getting a degree that wouldn’t actually help me. As I conclude my sophomore year, however, I know that isn’t true. What I am learning in classes now might not directly relate to what I end up doing for a career, but they are classes offered at my school for a reason and that reason is to help students to learn and to grow.

I’ve probably been through every major in my college’s course catalogue. I could tell you that it takes ten history classes to be a history major, what different concentrations you can pursue through a Human Services degree, and so much more. I have spent hours of my life skimming through the pages of the course catalogue and the course listings. The Registrar’s website is a bookmarked page on my Google Chrome. I always end up back and these sources because I keep praying that one day I will look down at a random page and read something that makes total sense. It’s easy to want this. It’s easy to want one straight path that will leave you completely satisfied, has great job security, and isn’t too difficult. It IS NOT easy to get this.

In a meeting the other day, I watched a TED X talk called “Why Some of us Don’t Have One True Calling”. If you’re lost and don’t know what you’re doing, or even if you think you have everything figured out - take a look at this talk. Emilie Wapnick, the speaker in the talk, explains her own personal struggle of diving head first into something she has a lot of passion about only to inevitably get bored with it and completely switch to something else. I saw a lot of myself in her words and I know I have a lot of friends with similar situations.

Basically, the moral of the story is, you don’t have to have only one “thing”. You could be a teacher by day and a musician by night. Or a nurse and a painter. It’s okay to not know how to combine all of your passions yet, because sometimes they don’t need to be combined into your career for you to still be able to enjoy them.

If you still are struggling to figure out your passion, ask yourself this: when am I happiest? At the end of the day, money and success will only bring you so much happiness. When you look back on your life, you’re going to want to have enjoyed as much of it as possible. So, a good starting point would be to ask yourself what makes you happy and see what you can get from there.

I’m not trying to come across as an expert. Trust me - I struggle to take the advice I am typing out, but I am trying and I hope you do too.