Where Will Life Take Me

[Ciara]

It's so hard (especially for me) not knowing where I'm going or what my future will look like. I like to KNOW, PLAN, UNDERSTAND what it is I have to do.

The hard part is not achieving the goal, it's figuring out what my goal is.

I'm a freshman in college so of course I'm having this problem right now. First I wanted to major in journalism but I hated the only school that offered journalism in my state so now I'm majoring in business. I want to work for Eaton because my dad works there (so I have connections), it's a great company to be apart of, and it's international so I would be able to travel the world. I'm not good at numbers but I'm good at interactions with people so, as of right now, I'm leaning towards either concentrating in Marketing or HR. I'm really interested in sales, but I want that one on one interaction with the consumer and nowadays I feel like big companies (like Eaton) only deal with other companies which bores me. Another catch is the fact that Eaton hires engineers and trains them to become salespeople (Eaton is a power-oriented business so having a salesrep that understands the product helps).

So, because of that, I've thought about majoring in Engineering. There are so many problems with that idea though:
1. I don't know anything about engineering and math has never been my strength.
2. I would lose a year of college work because my business credits probably wouldn't transfer to engineer credits.
3. The only reason I'm even considering engineering is to get a job with Eaton.

Someone told me that their school offered an Engineering Management major so I looked to see if my school did as well; they do, but it is only offered as a graduate degree.

I could double major but that is a lot of work and I don't even know if I am good at engineering, let alone what engineering is all about.

I'm posting this to see how other students have worked out what they are passionate about and how they made the decision to major in whatever they are majoring in. I love advice so please feel free to comment with your ideas, opinions, and experiences.

 

[Lucky Shadow]

You're not the only one. I'm actually taking a semester off cuz I have no idea what in the heck I'm gonna do with my life. I know I wanna write, but what am I gonna do until that actually pays my bills? I'm passionate about English, the future I want to see, and about the people around me. Not just the ones I care about, but all of them. I think I'm fairly good at helping people be happy, and I'd love it if I could do that for a living. But tell me, do you know of any careers where those passions could guarantee me a job?

People tend to ask, "Oh, why don't you just major in English if you love it so much?"

Maybe because English majors are a dime a dozen, and I need way more than that to get a job? I also don't think I'd feel very fulfilled just editing other people's writing all day, even if I got to write at home. I'd like to help people, but I don't want to spend 10 years learning how to be a psychologist. I felt pretty stuck. Totally directionless last semester, and I actually ended withdrawing before the end because I was so mentally unhealthy. Guess that's what'll happen when you pigeonhole yourself, huh?

Lately I've started broadening my options, basically because I had no other option besides being a professional hobo. And I realized something: I have a real passion for video games, something that I had disregarded up til now because I didn't think it was really valid. I started thinking about it, and realized that, in the right position, game design could fulfill a lot of what I wanted to do. I know it probably doesn't sound like it, but I really believe in the potential of games to tell stories and change minds. That's not really the important part, though. The important thing is that, after I stopped pretending that I only had a few paths to get where I wanted, I had hundreds of options. If you really think you want to go into business, you don't have to change that. My advice would just be to remember that if none of your options for the future look like what you want, then you're not looking at all the options. There's enough jobs and paths to them that pretty much everyone can find something that suits them.

Well, that's my two cents, hope it helps. Oh, I would also like to share this: I thought all my life that I was going to be a genetic engineer, up until about a year ago. My lung collapsed and I spent almost two weeks in the hospital, just thinking. Realized I wouldn't be very happy as a scientist, especially if I had to spend like a decade in school for it. Looked around, and realized pretty quickly what my real passions were. Try to never assume you have no good options.

 

[Ciara]

@Lucky Shadow Wow this actually helped a lot. I hate that I'm responding until just now but I read this earlier today and started to think about what I like to do and what I'm good at. Thank you so much! That would be awesome if you designed games. That would be such a fun job and if that's what you like to do, you'd never get bored. I want to have a job like that. Maybe I'm having troubles because there are SO many options and paths and I wasn't blessed with an obvious strength or passion. But I will definitely keep my eyes open to the possibilities and try to figure out where my passions lie.

 

[Lucky Shadow]

*tips ushanka* Happy to help, and don't worry about the slow response. I'm just glad it helped. It's good that you say that you haven't been blessed with an obvious strength or passion, because that's what the problem is. A lot of people tend to assume that they have no useful skills when they haven't found something they're really good at before the end of high school. The problem is they look for something they're already really good at or immediately love right off the bat. Most of the time it hasn't worked like that in my experience. With my skills I realized over time that I had a knack for certain things that gave others real trouble. Skills are usually less important when you know what your general strengths are (i.e. high/low level math, chemistry, physics, English, visual art, people skills, etc) because you can make yourself good at anything that's in those general fields with enough practice.

Passion is what's important for me, because it's how I motivate myself. For me, the easiest way to find what I really care about is to explain why I like things I already know I like. For me, when I find something that's really, really important to me, I won't be able to shut up about it. A friend messaged me during a conversation the other day that he thought words weren't important compared to actions, and I wrote the poor guy half an essay on the power of words without even really meaning to.

In my fairly short time trying to figure out what to do with myself in my remaining 80 or so years, I've found that keeping my eyes open to myself and the people around me are the fastest way to find out who and what is important to me. Life has had a way of getting my attention to things sooner or later, as long as I keep a look out.