Once you graduate from high school the most common question that people ask is What’s your career plan? What are you going to pursue? What do you want to be? People just start shooting these questions at you.
I went through the same thing. Honestly, I had no idea about my career goals. Slowly, I started feeling dumb. I started thinking if I am a little behind in comparison to other people of my age group. If I ever asked my friends they knew right away what they were going to be. I felt left out. I started spending hours every day researching multiple career departments. The problem with me is that I love everything. I love to study anatomy, I love to open and close machines, I love to read about the research in different health care departments, I love to paint, I love acting. After researching different career departments I got more confused. I spent most of the summer vacation researching the perfect career path for me. I contacted my high school, and college career counselor with my questions and concerns. They all kept on telling me that I am ahead of my game as I already started looking for my career goals. I felt crazy because there are people around me of my age group who exactly know what they want to be and here I am who don’t know anything. Millions of thoughts were bungee jumping inside my head.
Everyone kept on asking me what I was planning to do and I had no answers. I got so many pep talks from the people on how important this is to know your career goals. What an ideal career goal should look like? How much money should you make for happiness? These were the same people who tell others that happiness doesn’t come from money it comes from peace. I was so surprised to see the two-sided faces of the people. I felt like people are trying to fit me inside an ideal job box. That box was full of pressure and no oxygen was present inside. It was painful to be inside that ideal job box because it wasn’t about happiness.
It was impossible to take that amount of pressure. Due to this, I came up with an idea. I decided to tell everyone different answers based on what fits their ideal job box. It was a life-changing decision that I made. People stopped bothering me because they were satisfied with my answers. I was still concerned about my career goals but this time I didn’t have to deal with the ideal job pressure.
Finally, my college started and the same thing was on the first day itself everyone kept on asking about the major and career goals. But this time the responses were different. I mostly got to hear they don’t know. At least I knew that I wanted to make my career in health care. No wonder why career counselors kept on telling me that I am ahead of my game. Later on, I even contacted my friends on how they are doing and they all also changed their major, some switched from business to psychology, some switched from nursing to being a doctor.
After thinking over this I felt like I was stressing over nothing. I took some classes over the college and then I knew exactly what I wanted to do. The answer was right in front of me my whole life but I never focused on it. I just needed some extra hands-on experience to understand my career goals. Yes, I am special because I took extra time to select my career goals. I want what’s best for me and what I love because I am selfish. I don’t want to fit in anyone’s perfect job pressure box. I hope to achieve all of my goals and have a successful future.