Career Cluster
In high school I took a career matching assessment. I matched with careers from artist, to mechanical or civil engineer, to janitor (the algorithms weren't extremely sophisticated 6 years ago). It was then that I decided I was “too complex” for a career assessment to properly peg my desires. In Lindsey Pollak’s book Getting From College to Career, she writes “there is definitely a way to put yourself a few steps ahead of the pack: you can take a thorough career assessment” (Pollak, 56). I honestly have to disagree with her. I’ve taken dozens of career assessments in the past 4 years, and not a single one of them has turned up options that I would enjoy doing as a career. This isn’t to say that taking a career assessment can’t be helpful to others, but a career assessment I even took recently completely missed the mark on my career ambitions.
I’d probably be great at business administration given my skill set, but I would never be able to enjoy the field because of the personalities involved. And that’s what career assessments can’t always peg accurately, your skill set in the context of your personality and passions.
Every adult and their mother has career advice for you when you’re in high school. Some of the advice is helpful, some harmful, because it’s everything that helped them. The problem is, I’m not them. Pollak said, “an important step [in determining your career] is getting rid of what other people tell you you should want” (Pollak, 52) and this I strongly agree with. No one can tell you what is important to you in a career other than yourself. And there are a million ways to find them out. There are hundreds of sites and articles like this one on the the balance, explaining how to tackle the idea of choosing a career and they all essentially say the same thing. Find out what you like, find what careers match up with your interests, test them out, and go from there.
When I was a junior in high school, I had no idea what I was passionate about; I only knew what I was good at. I excelled in almost all of my classes, but specifically in math and science. I went into senior year with the idea that I would be applying to colleges as a physics major because it interested me and I was good at it. And just like that, a simple assumption shaped the next 4 years of my life.
5 years after deciding to be a physics major, I’m writing on a website called Medium for one of my last courses in my Media & Communications Studies degree. I changed because I knew that my school’s physics program was geared towards research, and I wanted to do practical work in working with sound. Almost none of my classes in my major would address this need and I didn't want to sit through 2 more years of irrelevant courses and a lifetime of irrelevant work. Pollak said, “If you have a clear passion, why not avoid this midlife fate and pursue your passion right now” (Pollak, 60). So I switched. When I did that, I had to reassess what I was passionate about.
I thought I was passionate about physics until it became too irrelevant to my career path. I had to reassess what I would enjoy doing for the rest of my life and what career would allow me to have the financial freedom I wanted. So many people tell you never to worry about money, but I don’t see the point. If I want to be able to live my life the way I want, I need a job that can pay for it. Luckily, not everyone is saying ignore the money, such as Pollak, who wrote in her book, “whatever your situation, it’s important to include your feelings and goals about money as a factor in your career decisions” (Pollak, 63). And money should play a role in my decision making if I want to live a comfortable life where I don’t have to worry about money.
In the article Big Money vs. Job Satisfaction, Phyllis Korkki quotes Daniel Kahneman, a professor emeritus of psychology at Princeton and one of the authors of the study used in the article. He said, “it’s not so much that money buys you happiness but that lack of money buys you misery” (Korkki) which is pretty powerful stuff. The study showed that past an annual income of $75,000, money no longer was a large factor in determining people’s happiness. I want to be in the comfortable zone. I don’t need to be a millionaire, I just don’t want to have to worry about it. The thing is, with an MCS degree, I may have to. In the article Salary With A Mass Media Degree, “According to a salary survey conducted by the National Association of Colleges and Employers, communications majors graduating with a bachelor’s degree earned an average starting salary of $42,300 in 2012” (Time). That’s obviously lower than I would like, so I have to reassess and see if it’s something I can make work, or something worth considering other options over.
When you Google career, the first image result is what you see below. The emerging issue I see is jobs are becoming increasingly diverse, while the career paths we think of stay narrow. The people below represent the ‘standard jobs’ and we often don’t think outside of them. Our job today is to realize that we can stray outside of this paradigm.
Finding a job that is right for me and meets all of my criteria is extremely difficult. I have one or two in mind, but they could turn out to be terrible matches for me. I just need to take it one step at a time and be open to whatever gets thrown my way. But for the moment (and hopefully more), it looks like working in communications for a non-profit which works with those who are differently abled is my match.
