“I can tell from what you’ve told me that you’re a career oriented woman.”
That was what someone from the career center (CCO) here at Purdue told me this week. I booked an appointment just because I knew I liked my major, but I didn’t know what I wanted to do with it. I’m so grateful that the tech industry is so broad, because there’s so many things that you can work on designing and coding to help the greater good and advance society. However, most of the jobs that people tend to go for in the tech industry are corporate jobs, and while those are very respectable careers, I just wasn’t sure if that was going to make me happy.
All this time, I thought I was weird for not wanting the typical 9-5, get married, have kids, and so on. It seemed like everyone had similar mindsets and goals. Not talking down on those aspirations at all, but I don’t think that lifestyle is going to make me happy.
When the lady from the CCO told me that she thought I was career-oriented, it made me feel better. She didn’t think that I had crazy big dreams and aspirations to do so many things in life. She didn’t think that I was crazy for not wanting the typical 9-5. Best of all, she didn’t think I was crazy for having so many interests apart from tech! I love the tech industry, but I want to be able to work on a project or research something that I am really interested in and not just a 9-5 job because that’s what I’m “supposed to do”.
There are so many sectors that I’m interested in working in. There’s cybersecurity, which stems from my interest in forensic science (I blame the show Psych). There’s business, which stems from my interest in entrepreneurship and creating my own company (What’s my company going to be about? I don’t even know). There’s public health, which stems from my interest in being part of the Purdue Period Project and reading about how data science is used to predict the number of coronavirus cases and resources there are. There’s music, which stems from my interest in playing the violin and composing. It’s just too much for me to decide.
It’s been a week since that conversation I had, and I still don’t know what extra classes I want to take.
I think it is possible to love your job. There are so many jokes about just going day in and day out in your job, and to me, they’re not funny. Why would you joke about not liking your work? You have to work for the rest of your life, so you might as well be excited about it.
I just realized that we tend to label ourselves based on our job, not on our personalities. One of the first questions people tend to ask when you get to know them is “what do you do for a living?”. It’s not “what are your hobbies?” or “what are your dreams/aspirations?”, which is surprising because humans are dynamic. We aren’t stagnant, and we are always changing and growing and adapting. We shouldn’t just choose what career we want just from a premature decision we made when we were in college. We should really take the time to explore our interests and find out how they can align with the job that we want in the future.
My point is that there’s so many societal expectations on us, and it’s okay to not satisfy all of them. I think it’s normal to question everything. Why is everything the way it is? It’s not stupid, time-consuming, and “out-of-the-box”. We should normalize being confused. I’ve seen too many people look like they “have it all together”. Once we’re able to be vulnerable and speak out about our uncertainties, there’ll be a realization that everyone is just as confused, and that’s totally okay.