The most common question I get nowadays is “What are you doing after graduation?” The next question is usually “Where are you looking at living?”

Ah, another question I don’t know the answer to. I’m from LA county. Right now I think I would like to end up here eventually. The majority of my family is here, and I have strong emotional connections to the old parts of Southern California. But I’m also attracted to the thought of living somewhere different for a while.

Of course, having not lived anywhere else (except the North of England for a semester), I’m not sure where I’d want go. So I started by narrowing down where I think I am less likely to want to go.

I don’t think I want to move to somewhere sparsely populated. I’m young right now, and I want to move somewhere with people and energy and life all crammed in together. Eventually I realized I really just want a large, connected city. Maybe Boston, or Washington D.C., or San Francisco.

That realization actually helped a lot. Because I’m probably not going to move to a city without employment (I cold try, but it’s kind of tricky to live somewhere without income), I’m able to use my job search as a tool for scoping out cities. For example, I recently applied for a job in Washington D.C., that I would love to get, without knowing much about the city. Now I know that it’s apparently a very happening place for recent graduates, and that I have some connections to people who already live there. In short: it would be awesome. And I might not have looked without the job to push me to.

Continue reading →

Monday. March 1st. I awake, and groaning, roll out of bed. I give the mirror a sarcastic look. It’s mocking me. Sweeping past my languid eyes to wave at my piles of work, and snickering. I turn away, open my computer. Look at the list. Thesis. Reading for my classes. Shift at the Motley. Start this project, finish that. At the bottom, pretending to be forgotten but actually omnipresent, my hardest challenge. Future plans.

Flashback. It’s January. The semester is new, fresh, shiny. The homework is introductory, midterms are far off, and the dining hall food still holds novelty for me. I look at my list. Thesis. Hard, long, but exciting and not extremely urgent. Classes. I like my readings, I like embarking on these new subjects. Work. A welcome break from academics. Choir. Super fun.

I add a line. Future plans, blog posts. I’m optimistic. I don’t know what I’m doing, and that’s exciting. There are limitless possibilities to explore, and I’m excited about looking at all of them. I surf through the Gateway portal, looking at all the positions I could apply for. There are so many! In so many locations! I start to add them to my favorites. Then I can go back, decide which to apply for. I see myself as over-achieving, churning out the words in my excitement.

Flash forward. Late February. I haven’t written a blog post in weeks. I’ve made great strides in other tasks, but I feel overwhelmed. The work doesn’t seem that excessive, but it feels like there are fewer hours in each day. I never seem to have enough time. Deep down, I know this is part of becoming an adult, and it’s not something that’s going to go away anytime soon. But how can I do it? How can I get done what I need to get done?

My senior friends seem to be have similar problems. Instead of smaller assignments that can be chopped into smaller parts, we have these longer projects that need to be taken in large chunks. Like thesis. I really don’t get anything done if I only have one hour. I need at least a three or four hour chunk to make progress. It’s similar with the job search, which I think is why I’m not as far along as I would like to be. I need to finish thesis to graduate. I’d like to find a job by then, but there’s no set deadline, so it feels a lot less urgent.

The variety of choices doesn’t help; each position has a different deadline. It makes it very easy to minimize the importance of each, in favor of thesis and classwork and sleep. But I really can’t do that any more. I need to make progress here.

I think for me, at this point, it’s an issue of buckling down and getting to work. The enthusiasm from the start of the semester isn’t gone, but it’s muted. It’s easy to wait until I feel like working on this. It’s even easier to forget that action comes before motivation, not the other way around. So here’s to a new morning, a new month, a new start on all the action. To jumping into the grudge work without the fiery passion for it, and keeping it going.

Begin:

1 : to set about the activity of: start
2 a : to bring into being : found:  b : originate, invent

— to begin with : as the first thing to be considered

From www.merriam-webster.com

I am four months from graduation, and the question has been repeated over and over. It’s been a constant since childhood. “What do you want to be when you grow up?” Many kids changed their dream careers from year to year, as if trying each on. A few knew, and seemed to be born knowing, what they wanted to do. I’m not either of those people. I’ve never really been sure what I want in life. I’ve managed to get to the place where I tell people that I am “exploring different paths” or “going to get some experience first” or am “figuring it out”, but inside I’m thinking I HAVE NO IDEA WHAT I’M DOING WITH MY LIFE; PLEASE STOP ASKING ME.

I’m not actually complaining about the question. My issue lies with the stress it creates. It makes me feel like I’m behind, that I should have my life itinerary printed, color-coded, annotated, and posted on Twitter.

My career is one aspect of the future I am trying to find. But where do I begin? Where does anyone begin? I feel like I’m trying to look at possible futures for myself and I can’t make out anything because I’m blinded by the sheer scale of everything that’s out there. How do I bring my life  “into being”?

I have an idea of some of the careers I don’t want. Mostly I don’t want to work in certain healthcare settings, such as becoming a doctor or nurse, though I have huge amounts of respect for the people who do. I also know I don’t really want to become a therapist or counselor, because as a psychology major, I’ve had a lot of time to think about that one. Things become trickier when I focus what I might want to do. I’m looking for specifics, such as a job, possible locations to live, etc., but what I’m really struggling with is the big stuff. The life-goal stuff.

Last semester, I realized that I really needed help with this. So I went to CP&R and met with Valinda Lee. It was amazing, and I would recommend them to everyone. One of the main reasons I wanted to blog here was because of how helpful they’ve been, at getting me started and keeping me going.

Over the course of my meetings, I learned two things. First, that nothing is permanent, and in fact most people go through several careers. So figuring out a career is like figuring out your life, in that you’re never done with it. It’s a process.

Second, I realized that I wanted to get out of school and into the “real world” before I made any big decisions. So suddenly, I have a beginning. Find interesting work, preferably with pay, for after graduation. I don’t need to plan out the next ten years, just the one.

That realization, that I only have to worry about a little bit of the future at a time, is incredibly motivational for me. Instead of being blinded by life in general, I can just look and think more about what I want to do next. I feel like I have more time, that I can slow down a little. There’s really no reason to rush.

So by graduation, I hope to know what I’m doing after graduation. And that’s really all I need.