Advice to a college grad
“I guess at this moment of my life what I mostly need is direction. Coming from a family of immigrants we have never really seen past high school. College was a new frontier for us, so the road ahead is all new. I’ve done some research but I am still not sure of what I want to do in the future. All I know is that I am going to have to work very very hard & be very creative if I want to move forward because of the competition.”- J.
I received this note in an email from a college grad I’ve been advising, and I’m sharing it because I felt that the writer’s tone rang so true for so many people, no matter their birth status or age, or any other false divisions between people. I’m not an immigrant, and I graduated into a substantially better economy (1996), but despite my current coaching business, when I graduated, I had no plan whatsoever. When I graduated all I knew was that I wanted to get the hell away from college, and homework and being told what to do. Such was the extent of my in-depth, strategic master plan.
If you had asked me what else I was planning to do with my life, I would have gotten very grumpy with you, and started feeling very sorry for myself regarding my life of misery and suffering. This cat would have been my spirit animal when I was about to graduate college:
And trust me, both my parents are college graduates. My mother has a master’s degree. My parents bent over backwards to help me figure out my sh*t, and frankly, just stop kvetching. Even with all their help and compassion, a large portion of my whining was due to my realization that, as Rilke, says, I had to live my way to my own particular answers. (Let the melodrama begin!)
Today, as an “expert,”, upon reading this email, I almost wanted to say to the writer, “Oh? You don’t know exactly what you want to be when you grow up? Go on….” How many clients do I have who are three times his age who are just as confused? On the other hand, “at least” this young man knows he has to be creative and work hard, so as long as he stays true to himself, I’m not super worried about him. He’ll make it happen. He has the right attitude.
I suppose my point is, that sure, this guy is at the very beginning of a journey that probably will be, in equal measure, both fantastic and horrible. But it’s the same journey that all of us, whatever our birth status, take, or at least should take: the journey to figure ourselves out, and to be true to ourselves.
“We all live with the objective of being happy; our lives are all different, and yet the same.” -Anne Frank