It’s the first week of spring quarter. Do you have your career mapped out yet?
Well, then, how about grad school?
Your summer? Please, tell me you have your summer planned!
If you’ve ever been assaulted with a line of questioning such as this, not only are you not unique in the slightest, but you probably complain about it a lot, too. Let me guess: You want to work for a nonprofit, but your parents are hell-bent on having their precious offspring become a CEO. Or you want to smoke pot all summer, but your wallet demands that you put in extra hours spitting in the burgers at Islands. Or, God forbid, you want to skip grad school and begin your foray into the wild and wooly working world the minute UCSD is done with you. While having disagreeable parents, unreasonable goals or a desire to break the overachiever mold is definitely a problem, there is a much bigger problem here.
The problem is that we’re supposed to plan — but, honestly, what has planning ever done for anyone? It’s spring break, and I planned to go party it up in Mexico or maybe the Bahamas. But instead I’m sitting in my underwear typing a column with nary a beer or a grain of sand in sight. See what planning is good for? Nothing.
Especially planning months or even years ahead. When we were in high school, the pressure was on to plan our college careers before we’d even mastered the art of the locker combination. Before we even had our drivers’ licenses, we were supposed to know what university we were attending, what our major would be, what dorm we would live in, what professor we would despise and what disgusting habit we would ostracize our roommate for having. All this, before we’d blown off a single AP test, SAT prep course or college application. If a friend dared to earn a higher GPA than us, it was just cause to stop returning phone calls and spread vicious rumors behind his or her back. SAT scores broke up whole cliques. And college acceptances — the drama! The intrigue! The sobbing!
And after all that, was college any respite? Of course not — we have grad school, summers in Europe and careers to plan for — as if studying in Scotland or taking on that extra internship will spare us from a “career” in a soul-crushing, dead-end job after college.
Not to be cynical or anything (Me, cynical? Never!), but I highly doubt the telemarketers, garbagemen and Wal-Mart stockboys of the world planned to end up where they have. Actually, in a fictional survey I conducted of people in these jobs, a full 68 percent said they did not plan to go into the field they did and instead planned to be “a billionaire jet-setter with three Porsches and a Range Rover”; 21 percent said they had planned to be “the guy that publishes all those porno mags.” Another 11 percent said, “Get off my lawn.” Fictional surveys don’t lie, folks.
Career “planning” (it’s really just wishful thinking) is wonderfully, delightfully futile, especially considering today’s job market. A non-made-up statistic I like to throw out is that on average, people will change careers — not just jobs, but careers — eight times over the course of their lives. “You mean, I’m not going to be a doctor?” the biology major sobs, rolling into the fetal position. No, sir, you’re probably not. If all UCSD bio majors actually followed through on the whole med school and doctor thing, well, we’d have a lot of doctors, and where would we go when we needed an unlicensed body piercer operating out of a graffiti-covered van?
Sure, you scoff now. To some degree or another, we all hang on to the elementary logic of “study psychology in college, become a psychologist,” “study history in college, become a historian,” “study physics in college, become Stephen Hawking,” and so forth down the line. If only it were that simple. More likely, the psychology majors will make really great strippers one day, the history majors will stage kick-ass Civil War reenactments on their neighbors’ lawns and physics majors will blow themselves up in homemade rocket ships.
The best are the people who say they’re planning to become professors. So, you’re working on making your handwriting illegible, your hair and wardrobe obnoxiously quirky and your moods either suspiciously constant or dangerously volatile? Gosh, that must be hard work. When a student says he or she wants to be a professor, it’s code for, “I want to stay at college forever and make my students’ lives as miserable as my life is right now.” But hey — without them, who would give business to the psychology-majors-turned-strippers and the economics-majors-turned-spammers selling “quality Canadian pharmaceuticals”?
Now, to wax philosophical for a moment: Screw planning. No planning in the world can trump simple ability.
So, what GRE prep course are you taking?
