I can confidently claim that I learned more in my final semester of college about what comes after college than I have in all four years combined. I think this is okay. After all, the purpose of an academic institution is education; however, I do believe the university should take on some of the responsibility of mentally and physically preparing its students for successful navigation of the "real world." One of the major keys to this navigation is oftentimes thought of as figuring out the most efficient ways of uncovering career opportunities and sniffing out our place of belonging in the workplace. The "real world," is more than just a job--that's the "job world"; the real world is a combination of our personal lives and the careers that we choose for ourselves. Sometimes we forget that monetary and career goals will never equal actual success if those goals don't align with our sense of purpose.

This is because our society isn't set up to emphasize the necessity of finding and catering to our sense of purpose. Our society also skews our concept of what actual success looks and feels like. We've all heard the warning "money doesn't buy happiness" and find proof of that sentiment in our awareness that extremely well-off individuals suffer from depression, substance abuse, and suicide across the country. Because of their monetary or career success, some people appear to have the world at their feet and we question why they are unhappy; however, imagine how immensely shackling the weight of this world can be if you had no idea what to do with it. This same person with their world at their feet, attuned to their sense of purpose, would know how to utilize the opportunities available to them to fulfill the parts of him or herself that can't be satisfied by money or material things.

In my final semester I realized that the steps to achieving a sense of purpose are one, uncovering what you're passionate about; two, fine-tuning the skills that contribute the enactment of that passion; and most importantly three, discovering a way to incorporate that passion into your daily life. Success is more than just landing a job that pays well. Success exists in much more intricate webs and combinations than society reveals through its outward operations. Throughout our adventurous and creative youth, we typically find what it is we're passionate about (whether or not we are entirely aware of that discovery or its significance). If you fervently enjoy drawing, teaching, reading, mathematics, cooking, dancing, athletics, singing, acting, talking really fast, making dolphin noises, taking things apart and putting them back together, or smelling strange scents and identifying them*, you usually start to partake in that activity from a young age. Like any skill, this passion is cultivated; it grows and matures over time, morphing and reforming into something defined, specific, and applicable in some way shape or form.

When I was three years old, I read my first book without any assistance, The Fat Cat Sat on the Mat by Nurit Karlin. Between the ages of eight and thirteen years old, I'd torture my little sister by strapping her into a car seat strategically placed in the living room and forcing her to be my student as I played school and wrote things on a personal-sized chalk board. (Eventually I was the one to teach her to write her name with a interactive song I made up.) In my eight grade year at Westfield Friends School, I put together a poetry anthology of original work as an English class assignment. However, in high school, I became discouraged when I couldn't even pass a geometry course. At Barnes & Noble, I'd often find myself sitting on the floor in the Psychology section, and purchased books about how the brain works. I became interested in Astrology and Zodiac-mythology late into my teen years (and shamelessly still enjoy indulging in my horoscope every so often), and I also became quite depressed and bereft of any real vision of a future or place in society for myself. I often felt out of place and isolated, even though I was an overly-energetic, quick-to-act extrovert. At the time, I had been reading books like The Catcher in the Rye: first-person novels and short stories that centered on a troubled individual coping with the pains of what was in their eyes a ruptured and corrupt society. I become quite wrapped up in and oppressed by the perspectives of these characters, adopting their cynicism and feelings of ostracization. Here, I was writing suicide notes in my journal in school while teachers were going over the contributions of the former Presidents of the United States in chronological order. Although literature gave me the ability to dive deeply into my own mind and explore my inner thoughts (and demons), I wasn't prepared for the suffocation and pressure of reaching the bottom and finding no answers.

If you combine all of the things I was interested in as a child--reading, teaching, writing, language, how the mind works, how the universe works--it would comprise my consolidated passion today, which is advocating for the emphasis and recognition of the humanities in education as the most important method of understanding what it means to be human, and how this need to understand ourselves transcends our need for technological advances and methods of interpreting mathematical data. However, society is geared toward STEM education and STEM progress, pushing individuals further and further into the shadows regarding their perception of who they are, why they are, and the importance of this knowledge. Without self-awareness, a sense of purpose, and clear and structured access point to understanding what being human means to the greater whole, we are nothing more than animals, nothing less than machines, and, quite literally, a race that exists solely for production and action based upon instincts. What's worse is that individuals who find a trapdoor (like I did) into understanding humanity often find themselves, appropriately, trapped in this realization. Usually neither clarity nor enlightenment is achieved because the means for it are not provided in our typically-structured education systems, and finding solace in another person or communally isn't likely (trust me, I know). And even if you do find a like-minded buddy, then what? That doesn't change the reality of society or your inability to get a grip on your realization that there's some cord you can't strike that needs to be struck in order to feel fully alive.

I went to college because my grade's average and I really liked learning, to be brief. I enjoyed writing and reading, so I majored in English. I didn't attend a four-year institution with the idea that I would go specifically to improve my skills to give me the tools I needed to act on my passion. But I ended up improving those skills and realized retrospectively that I now possess those tools because of my higher education. Some of these tools include utilizing literary theory to identify and explain implications regarding humanity and society in literary works, learning from those implications to improve quality of life, utilizing particular writing methods and devices in order to have an intended impact without the readers' awareness of authorial intentions and communicating those lesson, and selling myself.

There is a monumental difference between selling yourself and selling yourself short. If you do one, then you are avoiding the other. Selling myself became the number way for me to not only achieve sense of purpose but to feel successful. I discovered a way to incorporate my passion into my every day life. I now have a heightened awareness of what my passion is, I've acquired the skills that allow me to put that passion into action, and selling myself gave me the opportunities I needed in order to put that passion into action every single day. When I go on job interviews, meet and network with new people, interact with children, sit on a public bus, whatever I do, I clearly and consistently communicate in my body, written, and verbal language my beliefs and intentions to implement those beliefs. I have dedicated myself so entirely to what I'm passionate about that my eyes have opened and become trained to see every little opportunity to mold a conversation, a task, a job, an experience, to fit my purpose and passion. Every time I do something, whether it be at work or a hobby, I feel success when I apply my passion and center it around my sense of purpose.

Currently for employment, I'm a freelance social networking developer and communications assistant at Rutgers University--Camden Department of Undergraduate and Graduate Admissions. No, I'm not teaching or preaching or writing a self-help novel right now, but I have found a way to justify my job and relate it quite directly to my passion. I am a leg of the animal that hunts incoming freshman and transfer students to sink its teeth in and make sure these students are aware of all the educational opportunities available to them. I work in an office on the campus, so I'm always in an academic environment and surrounded by people that are eager to learn and professors that are eager to teach. I'm also attending graduate school to earn my Master's in English, which will give the credentials to move on to teach community college students. After eight long years of feeling pretty lost and somewhat hopeless, I finally feel successful. Regardless of how much money I've made at previous jobs or how well I'd done in my classes in the past, this feeling was new (and addicting). I think that it's because it took me until my final semester in college to put the pieces together and really see the larger picture on what success is--not only for everyone who just recently graduated and don't know where to go from here, but also for students in high school and for people who are no longer students and never took the higher education path. I wanted to concretely define what it took me so long to realize about success, so that you can start looking at it from the same angle now, wherever you are in life and hopefully find it for yourself. If you can spend a considerable amount of time identifying your passion (it's in there, I promise), working on ways to develop skills that relate to it, and seeking opportunities that allow you to employ it each and every day, you will capitalize on it in every way. In addition, the value of feeling true success is greater than the value of any paycheck.

*George Aldrich has been working with NASA for nearly 40 years doing one job: he smells things that are about to go into space.