I graduated college without a job.
When I started my undergraduate education at UCLA, I majored in neuroscience. These were exciting times: I was proud to tell everyone that I was going to be a doctor or a scientist. Looking back on it, I’m happy that I chose that major: the subject was rigorous and demanding, yet extremely fascinating. However, I’m also happy that as soon as I graduated, I decided to leave neuroscience in my past.
Let’s backtrack a little bit. By the start of my senior year, I did not want to pursue an MD or a PhD (arguably, the 2 most common career paths for someone with a science degree). Instead, I started to look for opportunities that were affiliated with science or health, but had another component that the aforementioned professions were lacking. Perhaps something at a biopharmaceutical company? A public health degree? Healthcare consulting? All seemed viable at the time.
Luckily, I didn’t get any offers. Don’t get me wrong, I was pretty bummed out at the time: many of my friends and peers received offers from various companies and postgraduate institutions. But in hindsight, it turned out to be the best possible thing that could have happened to me. I spent my summer after graduation living at home, learning about different fields, career paths, etc. I knew that one day I would stumble upon a profession that would allow me to leverage my science background. I just knew it.
Well, that day never came.
One of my favorite books is The Lean Startup by Eric Ries (some treat it as a holy text - I highly recommend you check it out). Eric speaks at length about the need for startups to “pivot” and change course if there is no product-market fit (I’m oversimplifying, but bear with me). So many founders worship their initial idea, he argues, that they fail to recognize and adapt to customers’ needs. A great example of a company that avoided this pitfall is the Flickr we know today (an image and video hosting platform). Initially, the founders wanted to make a massive online multiplayer game. A cool, new feature that they added was the ability for players to share and save their photos while playing. However, once the founders saw how popular the photo sharing capabilities were, they completely scratched the game and focused on developing this one specific feature.
Great, you’re probably thinking, but why the digression?
Looking back on it, I was committing the same fallacy that Eric wrote about, only with my life. My background in science was my initial “startup” idea. However, I didn’t recognize that there was no product-market fit. Science was simply not for me.
It’s a pretty scary thought — knowing that you spent 4 years of your life studying something that wasn’t meant for you. However, understanding and accepting that fact has opened up so many new doors for me.
In fact, because I pushed neuroscience aside and pivoted, I discovered my first passion in life: social entrepreneurship.
