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Back in 2003 I enrolled at Hunter College and began thinking about the difficult choice of the career that I would want after I completed my college education.
Some of people that I’ve encountered along the way had no idea of what they wanted pursue after they graduated. That is just how things work sometimes.
High school is not a cutoff time for deciding on your personal career path because this decision should not be taken lightly.
During the summer of 2003, before I started my first semester at Hunter College, I gave some though to one thing or another before settling on becoming Physical Therapist.
Settling is a wrong approach to take in times like this. After all, college is still a time for personal growth. And as you can probably tell, as I am writing this column, it looks like my plans for Physical Therapy did not turn out like I thought they would have.
The bulk of the credit for putting me on what I call a path to a creative career goes to Morgan Schulz, my English 120 professor first semester at Hunter. It was he that told me to stick with writing if that was something that I really wanted to do; if it was my passion.
Going for something what can call your passion is not something that everyone can afford to do, whether that is from a financial point of view or not. Oftentimes it’s a choice between a career that pays well and something that will bring you happiness in doing for the rest of your life. And a lot of the time the later choice does not provide much in terms of financial support.
As I figured it, if I’m not going to love what I do then I should not do that at all.
For example, if I am going to see a doctor, I would surely want a doctor that enjoyed the work that he does on every day basis.
Most of the time the job that you think you will do for the rest of your life is not the one that you will leave with upon graduation. What you need to realize is that if you chose to do something, as people say, that your heart isn’t in, you will still have to live with that for a very long time.
For a long time I remained stagnant in the place of my employment. Work in the beginning was just a way for me to support myself, a way to earn some extra cash. I had not outlook beyond the near future and thus I was content earning a minimum wage.
But this kind of thinking won’t take you far because there is no meaning to the present without an outlook on the far future.
To paraphrase something that a former co-worker said to me, if the job that you are doing at the moment isn’t something that you are likely to pursue as career then you simply have to make that job fit your career aspiration.
It took me seven year to do what ideally takes four years – get my undergraduate degree. And not because I kept failing my courses, but because I had to make a bypass into the real world.
In between stints of studying at Hunter, when I couldn’t afford to attend class, I had periods of full-time work. At times when I did attend class, I usually ended up doing school work up until the wee hours of the morning.
I made the choice to major in Media Studies and Creative Writing when I reenrolled at Hunter after a two-year absence. Reflecting on my first semester and the passion that I experienced for writing, it didn’t take me a long time for me to decide on a career path. But even then I had only a vague idea about what I wanted to do once I completed my studies. The rest of my time at Hunter was a period of exploration.
Remember that some things simply can’t be rushed. Only remember the words of Confucius, find a job you love and you will never work a day in your life.
Back in 2003 I enrolled at Hunter College and began thinking about the difficult choice of the career that I…
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