Congratulations, you are 18 years old and a high school graduate! Now, tell me what you want to do with the next 45 years of your life.
It’s the question every graduate dreads: “What’s your plan?” It’s an insane premise. Yes, in many places around the world, at 18 you are legally an adult. But biologically your brain has not finished developing, and socially you have only experienced a tiny sliver of what the world has to offer. How can you possibly know everything you want to do and be right now? You can’t.
Eighteen-year-old me had very different dreams and goals than 30-year-old me, and my current dreams and goals are (hopefully) different from what they will be ten years from now. You are a human being – you evolve as you age, and your career will evolve with you. In fact, according to information collected by the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, the average person has 12 jobs and changes careers three to five times over their lifetime.
That doesn’t mean you can’t know what you want right now and pursue it with your entire being. But it does mean you shouldn’t limit yourself, because your life and your needs will evolve. At different points in your life, different things will be important. Sometimes a high paycheck and benefits are all you need. At other times flexibility is vital. Sometimes new challenges are exciting growth opportunities, but sometimes you just need stability and routine. It’s OK to recognize that you don’t have all the answers now. But you can make decisions and take advantage of opportunities that will give you broader choices for whatever your future needs are.
Start by finding the crossroads of what you love and what you are good at. It’s easy to say “follow your passions,” but if you are a music lover and also happen to be tone-deaf, getting a performance-heavy degree might limit you. But what if you are an excellent writer? Maybe you take a journalism class with a focus on music history and appreciation. Perhaps you love medicine but faint at the sight of blood. In that case, surgery might not be your bliss. But if you are an excellent salesperson then medical marketing or pharmaceutical sales might be an option. There are a thousand ways to combine your interests with your aptitudes. This is why you should focus on identifying and learning transferable skills.
I was a musical performance major who had no intention of ever being an educator, a manager, a businesswoman, or a writer. But guess what? I have done all of those. And I have used the skills I learned from that first career in every endeavor that followed. Once I retired from acting, I realized that storytelling and communication were vital to being an effective teacher. The organizational skills I learned while stage-managing helped me lead teams and plan events. My classes in stage design made it possible to decorate window displays and gave me an eye for design. Actors negotiate contracts, and the experience I gained in this area transferred to working with vendors, employees, and customers when I started managing education sites. And all my dramaturgy classes taught me how to craft written narratives. The list goes on and on. Every single experience you have will be an opportunity to learn a new skill, and you never know when or how you will need them. So don’t limit your experiences. Branch out.
There is a reason most schools require you to take electives. We make jokes about underwater basket weaving, but if it sounds interesting then do it. You might learn something about structural integrity or the effects of environment on stress and performance. All knowledge is worth having.
More importantly, if you are interested in something but it scares you or intimidates you a little that’s a good sign. It means you are stepping out of your comfort zone and open to something new. You never know, those voice lessons might be just what you need to be a better speaker in the future, and ceramics or art appreciation might give you an eye for balance and color that makes you great at structuring presentation graphs so they are more persuasive.
If you really are not sure what you love, consider a gap year – but make it count. Don’t spend your gap year playing video games on your parents’ couch. Build houses for Habitat for Humanity or dig wells for the Peace Corps. Take an internship as a gofer on a movie set, or take photographs for travel magazines. A gap year that gives you experiences makes you more valuable and can help you focus on what you want. But it shouldn’t be easy and it shouldn’t be a vacation from life. Know what you want to get out of your time. Because time is the one resource you cannot renew.
Don’t be afraid to change directions. Whether it is six weeks into freshman year or 60 years into your career, most people switch tracks at some point. According to a report by theU.S.-based Council of Graduate Schools, 22 percent of graduate students are over the age of 40. That doesn’t mean what you were doing wasn’t valuable or that you made some terrible mistake. It just means it’s time to say goodbye to one thing so you can say hello to something else. When I was considering retiring from acting part of me felt like a failure, but then I happened to see an anonymous quote one day written on a subway chair in marker: “We don’t lose our dreams, we exchange them.” I have found that to be true. Don’t cling to an old dream that no longer serves you. Exchange it for a new one when the time is right.
Finally, you don’t stop learning once you get your degree. You don’t emerge from the halls of academia fully formed and ready to take on the world. Yes, you can learn a lot from professors and books, but you will also learn from friends and colleagues. You will naturally find mentors and guides along the way. Continue to be curious, and try new things. Whether that’s eating fried crickets from a street vendor in Bangkok or taking on a project at work that you feel is out of your depth, say yes to any opportunity that doesn’t seem physically dangerous or immoral. And trust your inner voice.
You don’t need to have all the answers right now. You just need to be willing to ask a lot of questions and take a few calculated risks.
Images: Pexels
This article appeared in the jingkids 2022 Graduation issue
