I don’t know what I’m doing with my life, which will come as no surprise to my roommates, friends, parents, professors, and anyone who has ever had the misfortune to ask me my major when I’m in a talkative mood. There are roughly two schools of thought in regards to career and major advice:

1) Do what you love and 2) Do what is practical

I’m not particularly satisfied with either. I love doing lots of things: reading (fiction and non-fiction), baking, talking to people, dancing, taking long walks, and explaining concepts. I am interested in many subjects: politics, economics, literature, philosophy, anthropology, mathematics, and history. And I know that challenging my brain, and then moving past that challenge into a peaceful flow of work, makes me happy regardless of what I’m doing.

I think I could love any career in which I had the opportunity to engage with meaningful problems, work alongside other people, and feel capable of success.

I could just try to choose, then, the most lucrative field with the greatest projected growth, assuming that I would grow to love anything that I grew to be good at.

But at the same time, the values I grew up with, and that pushed me to attend Scripps that I should use the resources at my disposal–my intelligence, my skills, my access to education, and my energy–in order to nurture my community and work for justice.

I used to think that the way to do that was through politics. I’ve always read obsessively about politics, and it felt like a way to make a large impact on serious issues. But when I got involved in politics, both as an intern and as a government appointed official on a youth advisory council, I found myself frustrated with the slow movement, inefficiency, posturing, and constant tradeoffs of the political and governmental system. My idealism and my introversion were not ideal–I could only ever fake schmooze, and I found myself often straddling both sides of an issue in my heart, uncomfortable with the existing political alliances in city politics that pushed me to outwardly adopt one stance.That’s not to say I didn’t enjoy my time–I developed facilitation, public speaking, research, analysis, and communication skills that serve me to this day. I felt like I was a part of some truly important and successful grassroots community efforts, such as Free Muni ( local transportation system) for Youth and stopping the SF police from getting tasers.

(That last link is a great, um, example of, like, the importance *touches hair* of, um, figuring out your, like public speaking *touches hair* tics)

My time and frustration in San Francisco politics made me more interested in economics, because, as a field, it promised a reasoned and often quantitative approach to public policy decisions, in contrast to the emotional, sometimes misleading rhetoric and side-choosing that had frustrated me in politics. I loved AP Macro and Micro as a senior in high school, and Economics is the major I put down on my graduation announcements. It’s still tentatively the track I’m on, since it lets me blend math and politics and psychology and after graduation, gives me a fair amount of wiggle room.

But I’m not sure, still. Who knows where I’ll end up? I would have never guessed, in my high school politics nerd phase, that I would be learning about software development frameworks and working on data migration and executive metrics. My current perspective, though, is skill-focused, inspired by the excellent blog of Cal Newport (who advocates for a skill based, “career craftsman” approach to finding a career). As long as I’m building skills and not doing anything evil, I can just explore, and be ok with uncertainty in terms of my long term career plans. I’m a planner–a really obsessive planner–but when I Wikipedia stalk my career role models, it’s clear that most career paths zigzag, and cannot be charted out in neat 5 year and 10 year plans. Focusing on skills and exploration, and being open to opportunity feels like the best plan I can make.