“What do you want to be when you grow up?” I remember my grandma asking me this question at the tender age of five. I remember being fascinated by the idea of being a paediatrician, so I told her that I wanted to be one. The following year, she asked me the same question and at that point, I fell in love with being an astronaut, so I told her that I wanted to be an astronaut. I romanticised being an astronaut and in the midst of everything in outer space had to offer. I read books and books about outer space and idolised Kalpana Chawla and Sunita Williams. I told everyone about how I wanted to be an astronaut and work in both NASA and ISRO. Then, I read that astronauts needed to know how to swim and had to train underwater. I was deathly afraid of water and never learned how to swim. Soon enough, I gave up on being an astronaut and switched to wanting to be an astrophysicist. I would not go to outer space, but I would still be studying it. There were some deviations of wanting to be a CEO and a psychologist, but the dreams of working in research labs at Oxford or Caltech were still alive, until the pandemic hit.
The pandemic did some significant damage to my way of learning. I lost my curiosity to learn, and at the same time, 10th grade was over.
“What are you gonna do next?” My father asked me when I was applying to schools for 11th grade. I had given up on learning. My love for astrophysics had fizzled out. What was I going to do next? My parents were open to me taking whatever I wanted, but I stuck to the orthodox way of thinking. I chose science with maths and did not enjoy any bit of it. This was the time when I revisited my fixation on psychology. Why am I falling in love with psychology as a science student? That is very unorthodox of me. Regardless, I let the subject take its rein on me and I fell in love with it. The love wasn’t gradual like astrophysics; it was fast and swift, and I was a fool who fell hard. This all happened during the 11th and beginning of 12th grade; the time when you are preparing for college applications. For every application I sent, my first choice was psychology. My extracurriculars validated my major and I got into the colleges I wanted. I chose Krea over my other options; the rest is history.
Now that I saw myself in no crisis of having to choose colleges and had much more time on my hands, I decided to reconnect with astrophysics. One thing I realised while doing so is that my love for it had never fizzled out, but rather remained dormant. I reconnected with the subject instantly, and now I am considering physics as my prospective major. I ask myself, “What will I do next?”
As I was introspecting, I remembered Stephen Fry’s comment on Oscar Wilde’s thoughts on having a set goal in mind. Fry said, “Oscar Wilde said that if you know what you want to be, then you inevitably become it – that is your punishment, but if you never know, then you can be anything. There is a truth to that. We are not nouns, we are verbs. I am not a thing – an actor, a writer – I am a person who does things – I write, I act – and I never know what I am going to do next. I think you can be imprisoned if you think of yourself as a noun.”
My interests can always vary. My interests have always changed, and I do not need a set goal. I can always have an overarching theme of what I want to do, but that doesn’t mean that I have to limit myself and stick to only one interest. I can always cultivate new interests as I move forward in life and choose to pursue that interest as a career. I remember my father telling me that a person’s career does not remain constant and keeps changing as times change.
I know that I will be fine in the future as long as I do not confine myself to the end goal of having a single ‘job’ (ick). I think this is something that everyone needs to know: instead of being a single-track-minded person, broaden your horizon and inculcate every one of your interests in your work. You will always find a niche that the world will require.