Tag Archives: goals

MUSINGS

The pain of not being where you want to be

June 26, 2012 – 2:19 am

It’s been a lit­tle over a month since I’ve been out of school. The race has begun to find a new job before the stu­dent loans come rolling in.  This time around, I’m actu­ally look­ing for a job that allows me to exer­cise my talents.

For too long there was a vague­ness that sur­rounded my future. Now that the cloudi­ness is gone and I can finally see the future that I want for myself, and I am in a rush to have it. Every day that I sit at my desk and do the same stag­nant things, I feel like I’m dying a slow painful death.

It was never really a doubt on whether my cur­rent posi­tion was for the long haul or not. It was some­thing to pay the bills and give me some expo­sure to the cubi­cle life. With my master’s degree in hand and a new found con­fi­dence, I am ready to set foot into the world beyond this place. I am ready to cre­ate, build, and collaborate.

The past cou­ple of weeks have been par­tic­u­larly dif­fi­cult to nav­i­gate through. I’ve found it hard to explain this to the peo­ple in my life who are right where they want to be in life. They have long left behind the strug­gle for their place in the job mar­ket. They don’t have to leave their job at the end of the day think­ing about how much time they wasted doing some­thing that didn’t make them happy.

Once I was out of grad school, peo­ple assumed that I would have all this free time. But I don’t. I’ve thrown myself into my writ­ing. I’ve thrown myself into a search for my dream job. The hard part starts now. I have to cre­ate my own dead­lines. I have to cre­ate my own assign­ments. I have to stand firm when peo­ple invite me out for sum­mer fun. My desk­top is still being occu­pied dur­ing every free moment.

This week I’ve felt so alone in this fight but then I read this arti­cle on the Write Curl Diary. In it GG Rene cap­tured every­thing that I was feel­ing over the past cou­ple of years. And though she was just vent­ing about her sit­u­a­tion, I felt a bit of relief. I never thought I was alone in this strug­gle but to see some­one else’s feel­ings, feel­ings that I too share, made every­thing a lit­tle bet­ter. I don’t know, I guess I felt jus­ti­fied in my feel­ings. I finally had per­mis­sion to feel this way.

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GOALS

How to find your dream career

June 19, 2012 – 11:47 pm

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.

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