Grow­ing up there are so many career options avail­able to you: fire­fighter, singer, dancer, police offi­cer, dinosaur, and more. As you get older, you might start ask­ing your par­ents and other adults what they do for liv­ing. Then you start get­ting answers like accoun­tant, engi­neer, pro­gram man­ager, ana­lyst, con­sul­tant, and direc­tor. By this point in your life, you are dis­tanc­ing your­self from the grand title of mas­ter dinosaur and real­iz­ing that you might have to pur­sue some­thing different.

The prob­lem now is what’s next? It’s not like you are tak­ing classes in account­ing and engi­neer­ing so how do you know you want to be an accoun­tant or engineer?

In high school, I had this grand idea that I would be a doc­tor. The specifics of what kind of doc­tor changed fre­quently but I knew that I wanted to work in the med­ical field. Why? Mostly because of the money but also because I wanted to make peo­ple feel better.

In col­lege, I majored in Chem­istry and quickly real­ized that I was in over my head. It was at that time I real­ized that I needed to have a heart to heart with myself. I needed to dis­cover what I wanted to do for the rest of my life.

Now I’m a huge believer in you should do what you love because life is too short to do some­thing that you hate. So, I set aside the lure of money and decided to fol­low a path that would make me happy. So how do you find a career that makes you happy? I remem­ber sit­ting in a room ask­ing myself these questions:

1. What do you love to do?
2. What would you love to be paid to do?
3. Who cur­rently does what I want to do?
4. What do I have to major in to do this career?

That seems sim­ple enough but some­times the answers don’t come that eas­ily. Or you could be like me and need to nar­row down the field to focus on a par­tic­u­lar career path. So once again, I found myself ask­ing questions:

1. What classes inter­ested me?
2. What assign­ments did I enjoy doing?
3. What job can I do that is sim­i­lar to this interest?

With these ques­tions, be hon­est with your­self. Don’t let out­side influ­ences deter­mine in what direc­tion you want to go. I didn’t rely heav­ily on my sup­port sys­tem to help me answer these ques­tions. I knew that the answers had to come from within me not any­one else.