How many people have asked you the most dreaded, demeaning, out right awful question: "So, what are you going to do after college?"
Well, my answer is always painfully the same: I have absolutely no freaking clue where I am going to end up after college.
After two years of fielding that dead end question, I have finally realized that is it OKAY to have no idea about the future. The world is an astronomically big place (literally) and the opportunities are endless. Instead of focusing my time in college searching for the perfect job, I am spending it learning about the gigantic residential planet I live on and the billions of extraordinary humans that inhabit it. As soon as I put down (maybe threw away, possibly burned) the, "Find the perfect Job For You!" self help books, my life started to make a lot more sense.
An amazing professor once told me that I would find my path once I stopped obsessing over finding it.
He was 100 percent right. The most beneficial moment of my college career was coming to the realization that I am interested in just about everything, not just that one perfect, undeniable major I thought I'd come to pursue.
College is not just about finding that perfect major to nail you that dream job you spent all of high school telling your friends about. It's about realizing your future is not just one major or just one job. It's made up of people and history, communication and connections, and years of people pursuing dreams, sometimes failing in the process.
Take classes that truly interest you, build up a knowledge base of subjects you would stand up in front of a thousand people to defend. Learn about why education is a privilege and spread awareness about countries still fighting for it. Spend your semesters flipping through pages detailing what our population is doing to our environment and what countries are consumed with war. In order to find your place in the world, you need to know whats going on in it.
Four years, eight semesters--give or take a couple--is the amount of time you have to tap into the endless databases and resources you have access too. You can have that one major that is going to get you that one job, but you also need to prepare for the life that comes with it. I started focusing on what the world had to offer instead of what a major did, and for the first time in my life I am not wavering.
After taking classes ranging from the U.S. dysfunctional incarceration systems, to the treatment of the mentally ill, over to the impressively mysterious mind of the famous Robert Conan Doyle, and back to anatomy of the human body, I have decided that to be a promising nurse (my intended career goal) I have to be a worldly student.
I still have no idea what I am going to do after college, maybe I will take my nursing license to help in the places I've read about, or maybe I'll enter the fight for better incarceration systems by caring for the people inside, or maybe I'll keep my education going.
I don't know where I will be in the next two years. I don't know what part of the world I will be residing in, or what my exact job description will be, but I do know one thing: when I let go of my "perfect job" obsession, I found the life for me.
