Wednesday, March 19, 2008

Quarter-Life Crisis

I applied to graduate today. It was a rather unceremonious event that felt more like paying your gas bill than starting the wheel turning on one of life's most momentous events. Likewise, I powered through three more pages of my thesis and spent an afternoon working in the office (doing, so-to-speak, actual work). It seems more and more that being a student should be my full-time job, but instead I'm paying upwards of $15,000 a year (after aid) for this opportunity. I'm beginning to think, though, that the business of universities as they function today is increasingly backwards, especially as these institutions of higher learning compete to attract the ever more competitive classes of 2012 and beyond, each cohort more a group of achieved than the last, each putting the senior class to shame for their accomplishments. Rather than viewing a university education as an investment in one's future, perhaps it is time universities began to see the value in investing in our young minds.

Personally, I have little idea, standing now a little over three months away from that ever-touted day when I walk, bedecked in cap-and-gown, to receive the diploma I've slaved the last four years over. It will be a simple piece of paper, a ceremonious hand shake, and a few photographs to represent the past four years. In the reflective mood I find myself, I am increasingly questioning what it is I have learned over those years, what this journey to the eventual stage has meant. This piece of paper will represent, among other things, the awkwardness of arriving in Lag at 8AM on a Sunday morning to be cheered by my RAs (who, stalkers that they were, knew my name already). It will represent the starts of a number of life-long friendships and four years of glimmers of love and broken hearts. It will represent six-months in Paris, six-months in a place that felt completely foreign--nay, alien--at the beginning and now feels in many ways more like home than the original. It will represent literal days-upon-days of reading, paper-writing, problem-setting, and, of course, crazy partying to counterbalance the stress of it all. Last of all, it will represent a young man who was little more than an adolescent when he arrived and leaves fully aware not only of himself but also assured of his identity.

But I can't shake a nagging feeling that something is missing in all of this: namely, a sense of direction. I'm getting ready to, some might say, embark on the beginning of my fully-realized life, to begin that ominous search for a fulfilling and exciting "career." But I have no idea where to start!

To be honest, I love my major, I love urban studies, I could see myself happy as an urban planner, yet I can't at all say whether that career path would feel more right or more satisfying than, say, working as an office assistant or something along those lines. I once thought I would never go into research, but as I get further through this whole thesis thing I'm beginning to think that maybe research would be a worthwhile pursuit. I know some of the things that I like to do: I like to write (go figure)--just not for too long, I like to be in charge of projects (because I like to have control and to work independently), I can't work for extended periods of time without breaking frequently to concentrate on something other than my work, and I love thinking, reflecting...je pense. What job can use that skill set? What career can put those passions to practice? I'm looking, but I have yet to find anything that is actually, truthfully, perfect for me.

So I'll just sit here, at the end of Winter Quarter, and wait to hear what will come my way. I'll make a choice, I suppose, and figure out what I want to do with my life then. For now, however, life is good, and my thesis is getting written at a snail's pace, and it's almost Spring Break! And I'm blogging for the first time in months.

Weird.

Here's to not knowing where you want your life to go! Truth is, no matter how much they seem like they have a direction and a path laid out ahead of them, nobody my age, contemplating their imminent graduation from college, has any idea what they want to do with their life. I just have no direction to start with. That's the beauty of being young.