Advice for a College Graduate
From one millenial to the next
Our culture has conditioned us to grow up wanting to be something. All through elementary school we’re asked (almost jokingly) because it’s such a cute question for some reason, “What do you want to be be when you grow up?”
Then in middle school there’s some real-world simulation research project where you “seriously” look into what you want to be when you grow up. You look up the salary and the steps to get there, the job description, and you get a pat on the back from your teachers for a job well done, and sometimes a project like that at 13 years old even scares you out of wanting to be an astronaut or a pilot or a singer.
The question only gets heavier as you move up. In high school it morphs a little into “What do you want to study?”, because high school is all about getting into college, and college is all about getting a job… or so we’re told.
College hits and the question arises again, this time in many different forms. “What are you going to do when you graduate?” “Where are you going to work after graduation?” and even, “So what are you going to do with that expensive degree you got?!”
I hate this question in all its forms. Don’t get me wrong- I think it’s meant to be an important question that reveals important answers, but in these forms, it’s not. This question — in all its forms — is particularly bothersome, for me, because it pigeonholes us into a limited number of choices.
We have to think about the way we ask questions, because the way we ask dictates the answer we receive. Asking someone “what do you want to study?”, while a standard pre-college question, does not allow for any responses outside of what fields are offered to study in college. Like a multiple choice test-question, you are forced to choose a response from a pre-determined set of answers.
If you respond with “I want to study how to write books that sell”, someone will narrow your answer for you and say, “Oh, so English or English lit maybe?” And if we said, “I want to study art and travel and learn how to be a freelance artist,” someone might say, “So you’ll study art and maybe minor in business?” Even if we answered the way we wanted, we’d be corrected into the “right” answers, the pigeonholed answers. It’s natural, but it’s not the only way to think.
After college, the question is the worst because the answer has to be real, because you’re judged based on your response. When someone asks, “So what are you going to do after you graduate?” (and someone will ask), responding with, “I’m not sure,” is not among the multiple answer choices.
“I mean how can you NOT know what you want to do?! You’ve got a degree! You spent 4 years studying something! Go do it!”
This is what it feels like everyone is thinking when we respond with, “Well, I’m not really sure what I want to do”. So when we get asked, “What are you going to do when you graduate?” we know by now the “right” answer would sound something like this, “I’m going to work with a product distributor as their southeastern area sales rep.” A “wrong” answer would go something like this, “I’m going to see if I can get my blog to take off a little, and probably work at a local bookstore for a while to see if I can meet some other young aspiring authors.” A nose would crinkle, brows would furrow, and judgements would be cast, because this is not something you do with a college degree, or even without one for that matter, if you’re trying to support yourself and be an “adult”. Throw in a sarcastic, “Good luck” and you’ve just iced the cake.
The question always asks “what” though, so our responses then have to fit inside a specific little box of answers. What if we asked a different question that merited different answers, a question much more essential to our lives: “who do you want to be when you grow up?”
When people asked me growing up what I wanted to be, I always said, “a teacher”. And then I “grew up”, became a 5th grade public school teacher, lasted precisely a year, and quit in hopeless shame as I looked at all of the other choices (doctor, vet, lawyer, dentist, businesswoman, secretary, realtor, graphic designer, marketing analyst, advertiser, journalist, sales rep, etc etc) and none of those looked appealing either.
What was I supposed to do? I felt like it should somehow be simpler than this, to be 22 and working. I kept asking myself, “What do you want to do, what do you want to do”, and I’d run through all the options and still come up empty. Empty because my long list of things I wanted to do never matched up with an existing career. Empty because I was asking the wrong question. It wasn’t until I started asking myself, “who do you want to be, who do you want to be” that the answers flooded in.
I want to be someone who helps people move into places of new, rich, deep knowledge. I want to be a part of people’s journeys. I want to be someone who can write and create every single day. I want to be approachable and thought provoking. I want to be a person who has the opportunity to meet new people all the time. I really just want to be me. I was continually coming up empty for 2 mistakes many of us make straight out of college (or during):
1) We ask ourselves the wrong question.
2) We think our careers have to already exist.
Try asking yourself a different question, a question that allows for different answers, answers not on the multiple choice test, and give yourself some freedom to imagine a career. Build one yourself. It does not have to already exist. You can carve out that place and your path at anytime you want. I cannot promise security or ease, but haven’t you already seen where the search for those two things leads?
Pretend like someone has been asking you all along not “what” do you want to be but “who” do you want to be. What type of person doing what type of things? Why do you want to be that way? What qualities do you want to embody? What values do you want to represent? When I did this myself, it always came full circle back to me just wanting to be me. That was the most peaceful answer ever. I dreamed of doing exactly what I wanted on a daily basis, and still living the lifestyle I wanted for myself. I kept wondering why this had to be a dream. What was stopping me from being who I wanted to be, and getting paid for it?
It might sound all woo-woo-y, but we all have something to give to the world. There is something naturally inside all of us that the world needs. We are wired for connection. It is our primal instinct to desire a relationship of some sort with some person (usually several) besides ourselves. This is how I know for certain that we all come into this world with something inside of us that the world needs. That is our purpose, to give this thing — our truest selves — to the world.
It just so happens that the search for this “thing” can be incredibly frustrating and difficult, but if you are living an authentic life, one that is so purely you it could never be mistaken for another, you will find it. You will find that “thing” that only you have, and you will do it in a way that only you can, and the world will demand it from you. I know, it sounds like witchcraft, but if you get as desperate as I got, you will try even witchcraft. If you crave a day where instead of doing your job you are being your job, you will push past your fears and doubts, into strange places and cross boundaries you never knew you’d set for yourself, and you will find it.
So get to it. Figure out what’s important to you, what’s essential to your living an authentic life, and go do that. Ask who you are, not what you are. The what always follows the who. Make this quest a priority, for there is nothing more important than being yourself. There is only one of you on this entire planet. How could anything else take precedence? The world needs you to show up. The career, the money, the happiness- it will come.
Who are you? Who do you want to be?
