Undecided on what to do

juillet
Tue, 12 Jan 2016 10:14:17 +0000

It’s really common to not want to know exactly what you want to do in the future. 21 is still pretty young, and if you are still early in college (which it sounds like) you have some room to explore a little bit. Even once you settle on a major, your whole life isn’t decided - lots of people have pretty flexible careers regardless of their major, and you can change careers or retrain in the future. So don’t despair. You just need to select something that’s going to be a good foundation for future work in your field.

There are probably infinite interpretations of “helping people”, “making a difference” and “changing the world”. I mean, there are some obvious ones - people think of being a doctor or public interest lawyer, a nurse, social worker, some kind of helping profession. But there are those kinds of options in pretty much all careers! You could be an economist who works analyzing economic patterns and trajectories in resource-poor nations, and makes recommendations for improvement. You could be a civil engineer that works improving infrastructure in low-income areas. You could be an accountant or financial planner for nonprofit organizations. You could be a statisician or computer scientist for medical research. You could be a technical writer for nonprofit biotech corporations, or a communications director for a university that services low-income students, or a journalist who brings light to conflicts that most others ignore in far-off places. There are a bazillion ways to help people and make a difference, and there’s a large difference in the scope of changing the world.

So the steps to take are to decide what you are interested in, and major in that. Decide what kinds of things you like to do and would be content doing in a career/profession every day. (This may take some time - I was in my late 20s before I figured it out for sure, and lots of friends in my age group are still figuring it out while they work their first or second or even third job post-college.) you can make a series of moves to get to the place you want to be, but think about the task first - you can always transform that into the higher goal of helping others.