What’s Next After College

Career Decisions

darren garcia
Aug 8, 2017 · 4 min read

Transitions make or break an individual. Having walked through college safely does not guarantee a successful jump to adulthood. In this ambitious age where we are presented with unlimited choices and are expected to make the right decisions all the time, it is easy to be plagued with the anxiety of not really knowing what next to do after college. Going to grad school, finding employment, creating a start-up, or spending vacation can be easy answers to escape conversations that try to haunt you with deeper questions about your future that you have yet to answer.

So, what’s next? Uhmm…

To be honest, I have been thinking about this question since I was a sophomore in college. Until now that I’ve graduated, I’m still unable to provide a crystal clear answer to this. Whenever people ask me what my plans are after college, I disappoint them with very general and vague picture of how I see myself in the future. Wanting simply to be a better person someday is apparently unacceptable.

We are expected to be prepared with an elaborate case study or brilliant presentation on our future plans, with clearly defined goals and practical strategies on how to achieve them.

It’s perplexing how our whole life is structured with very clear directions at the start, to finish education and yield to the rules of the institution for a quarter of your life, then it is suddenly launched into the wilderness of adulthood where people are supposed to already know what they want to do. There are times when the degrees we earned hint us with the career we should head for after college. However, there’s nothing that really points us to what exactly to do next with our lives. The signposts that our careers provide us is not sensitive to our hearts. It is deaf to the yearnings of our soul. It does not evolve with the changing situations we face. We seek for something more than a career to answer this questions.

We know that our lives are richer and our individuality is more precious than any career choice can contain.

Unfortunately, we live in an era obsessed with measurements, ratings, and tangibles. Job titles and the materials it affords us to accumulate are the clear basis on which one’s individuality is gauged and validated. We are constantly liked or unliked based on this modern scale of worth. The only thing that matters ultimately becomes scoring high on the success scale with wealth, fame, status, and power weighing the most importance. And so we are pressured by well-meaning individuals to strive and win popular approval so that we can be protected from being labeled as a “loser” in life.

The problem with this is that it gets suffocating. Our individuality, once meant to flourish and thrive, is choked in the performance of self-creation acts to prove our worth.

We know that we need more than a career plan. The reason why it feels so daunting whenever we are asked with what we plan to do next is because it’s not just a simple question about our career. It is an inquiry to how much we know about life itself.

“What’s next?” requires us to define our values in life, examine where we source our identities, and reveal our underlying assumptions on how we live. Only when we cultivate an inner foundation will we be able to have the constancy to withstand momentary blows and popular disapproval.

It’s tempting to answer this question with our self placed at the center of this inquiry. When all our life we’ve been told to follow our dreams and only choose the things that make us most happy, it is difficult to understand how this life is not about us.

The most common approach in finding the answers to “what’s next?” is to list all the things we want to achieve in life then establish strategies that will enable us to get them. Our #lifegoals become the ultimate end, some goals more benevolent than others. In this way, we organize life like a business plan. This approach starts with the self and ends with the self. It is akin to navigating life with ourselves as the captain of our ship towards a destination where hope to find ourselves. It is a route bound to self-deception.

We don’t create life. We are summoned by life.

If I were to hopefully seek to find an answer what to do next with my life, I needed to resign myself from thinking that I am the absolute center of the universe — that life exists to make me happy and to answer to my demands.

I needed to stop asking life what I wanted from it, and start listening what it asks of me. Instead of approaching life like a business plan, I realized that I had to quiet my ego in order to hear what life has summoned me for. Knowing what’s next after college, becomes less about the comforts and my self-interests and more about recognizing the roles that life in which it embedded me. Instead of seeking some “higher” forms of work that can turn into a mere platform for self-promotion, I learned to embrace accountabilities and responsibilities. From simply trying to figure out what the best career path to take, I am now more conscious about discovering my calling and recognizing what life requires of me.

The question still intimidates me sometimes. But the more I recognize that this life is not about me, the more closer I am to finding the next clues.

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