Questions Regarding Career Choices Often Plague College Students

When I was about 5 years old, I remember filling in some kind of personal survey — the precursor to those that inundate everyone’s e-mail inboxes nowadays — with a variety of questions. The questions were of the sort that one could expect a small child to be able to answer, relating to favorite color, food, animal and so on.

The question that sticks in my mind is, however, “”What do you want to be when you grow up?”” I remember printing “”a dentist”” in clumsy capitals that hovered above the line.

My response was wholly arbitrary. I don’t ever even recall having any particular interest in dentistry. I likely forgot about my answer soon after I wrote it.

I think about the times I’ve pondered my career path since then, and I realize that if I were asked the same question today, my response would probably be just as arbitrary. Unlike many people I have known who have struggled arduously with the prospects of finding a job once they have left college, I am unconcerned with the future because I know I can be content with just about anything I find myself doing. I’ve found that my happiness with a job comes in knowing that it’s a helpful and morally enriching experience, not in worrying about finding enjoyment in the actual tasks I’m completing.

I have realized that when it comes to a career, it comes down to this: All work should be useful, productive and honorable. Anything beyond that is just details, and secondary to the importance of the three criteria I have mentioned. As long as I am fulfilling my obligation as far as being useful to others in my occupation, I feel that I can be very happy with whatever I do.

This outlook, however, has caused me problems as I try to figure out what I’m going to spend most of my life doing. I’d be just as happy driving a bulldozer as editing the poetry of Seamus Heaney for the next 50 years, as long as someone needed me to do it. It’s not that I cannot find a passion; it is just that I have too many of them. I would just as soon throw myself into archaeology as medicine, and probably with the same amount of gusto.

Many of my friends aspire toward very specialized career paths. I’ve never been like them. I admire the drive that spurs them relentlessly on, stomping over all that impedes their pursuits. My best friend has wanted to become a doctor ever since he was small, and he has not lost sight of that desire. Others I know are intent upon law school or graduate study in a particular field.

I’ve thought about going to graduate school, but I realized that whatever I might study, it would be because it seemed like it might be something fun and enriching to try — not because I have a driving passion to study a particular field. If I decided to try law, I would go to law school “”for fun,”” taking it in as an interesting experience (much to the horror, I’m sure, of those cooped up every weekend with their LSAT books). I would study medicine because it would be interesting to be able to help people in such a specialized way, not because of a passion I’ve held since childhood.

The ambivalence that characterizes my outlook on setting for a lifelong career is equally in force when it comes to the work I do now. I split my time between two realms: the literary and the technological. Neither has ever really held sway over me.

I enjoy the editing I do at the Guardian, and I like the computer work that I do at my other job. However, when I picture myself cooped up in a high rise reading newspaper articles all day for mistakes, or spending 70 hours per week in a cubicle in Silicon Valley, I confess I don’t feel a great deal of excitement.

Perhaps I have yet to find that one magical thing that will wed me to a particular career path, but I believe instead that everything’s the same to me at the end of the day, as long as it has been helpful. In time, I know I will tire of computers and editing, and it will be time to move on.

I’m not pressed for time to decide on what I want to do. I’ll be here at least another year-and-a-half — and I’m toying with the idea of adding another major, which would give me nearly three years before I have to hit the job market or try to sell myself to a graduate school.

Somehow, though, I don’t think anything’s going to change in the interim. I can see myself becoming one of those people who spends her life doing a variety of anomalous and varied things. Summer jobs will afford me the opportunity to try new things, but that doesn’t lead me to believe that ardor for a particular career is lurking around the corner. I am pretty sure that I have already found it — not in the choice of a particular pursuit, but in the assurance that whatever I do, I know it will not be a waste of time for others, nor for myself.

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