In college, everyone always asks about your career. They ask what you’ll want to do once you graduate, what your planning to do with your degree, and, the most daunting question of all, what is your dream job?
I have never had a clear vision of what I wanted to do with my life. In elementary school, I thought I wanted to be a teacher. In high school, I thought that because I loved to read that I had to be an English major in college. As an exploratory (otherwise known as a fancy word for undeclared) major in college, I bounced between sociology, anthropology, and science classes trying to find something that would stick. All of these classes eventually helped me land on my current major: Public and Community Health.
Whenever I tell people what my major is, the typical responses fall along the lines of, “I didn’t even know that was a program we have!”, “What does that even mean?”, and worst of all, “What kind of jobs can you get with that degree after you graduate?”. Public and community health covers such a wide base of concepts that the question of what job I want is often overwhelming. I picked this major because of the wide range of diverse career paths public and community health has to offer, especially because I still don’t have a dream job.
Public and community health requires an understanding of so many other topics like sociology, anthropology, and science, that it was kind of just a catch-all program for everything I loved learning about. I, like many other college students, had absolutely no idea what I wanted to do, so I just followed through with the subjects I was most interested in. There was never a plan or a blueprint to lead me to my perfect college, my perfect major, or my perfect ‘dream job’. So far, I’ve just gone with the flow and followed what I’m interested in.
It’s okay that I don’t have a dream job—I’m only 20 years old! In the past 10 years, my interests and passions have changed so much, that I’d be surprised if they don’t continue to change throughout the rest of my time at Ithaca College, and all the time I have after I graduate. Trying to focus on the perfect job now, when I still have no idea what type of career I really want is just unrealistic and stressful. Instead of worrying about what my future plans are, I’m going to focus on learning more about what I’m passionate about and enjoying my time in school.