Even though fall semester started less than a month ago, I have already been asked about my plans after graduation more times than I can count. At first, I thought it was embarrassing to say that I don’t have any concrete plans pending the end of my undergraduate career, but after some thought, I’ve realized that I still have a long time to figure out what I want to do for the rest of my life.
I can’t remember when everyone started asking what I wanted to be when I grew up, but I know it was a very, very long time ago. Of course, over the years my answers have changed; when I was 10, I wanted to be a princess, at 16 I wanted to be a doctor, and at 21? I know that I want to finish my degrees and graduate. Maybe I’ll take the LSAT and go to law school. Maybe I’ll take a gap year and work as a paralegal. Or maybe, I’ll scrap the idea of working in law all together and go back to school to be a professor. The point is, I have absolutely no idea what I want to do.
I don’t think it is inherently wrong to ask someone their plans after college, but I think that we shouldn’t have to give a ground-breaking answer. We’re in our early twenties, we don’t have to know what we want to spend the next forty years of our lives doing. Throughout school, we’re programmed to have an answer to this question; you’re not allowed to graduate and figure it out. Once school is over, you have to become an integral part of society by immediately finding a job that you’ll want to stay at for a long time. To this, I say, hogwash. There’s nothing wrong with taking time to figure out exactly the type of person you want to be. Take a gap year, travel, or just breathe. Enjoy your twenties. There is so much time to discover your career and you’re only twenty-something once.
If there’s one thing the Barbie movie taught me, it’s that you can be whoever you want to be. And like Barbie, it’s okay to choose a different path than the one you’ve been traveling. Don’t feel pressured to figure your entire life out the moment you graduate, and remember, you’re doing great.