My graduate advisor, the late Dr. Walter O’Brien, rarely told me stories from his personal life. However, after I expressed concerns over my own future, he shared with me a little of his own past. Graduate school takes a lot of work and seems to leave very little time to plan for what comes next. I felt reassured as he painted the picture: he and his wife sitting around the table saying “well, now what?” after he’d just graduated with his Ph. D.
The Right Answer
We spend most of our youth being taught to find the right answer. Whether learning about math, science, history, even literature, schooling focuses on calibrating students to produce the correct answer to list after list of exam questions. Beyond that, we’ve also been taught that there is a single correct process for arriving at these correct answers (Common Core, I’m looking at you).
The problem is, we find ourselves extremely uncomfortable with situations that don’t have a right answer (which is most of them). We think there is a right path to our education, career, even life itself – pick a major while you’re in high school, head off to college, spend exactly four years earning a degree, graduate, get a job, meet someone, and live happily ever after with 2.1 kids, and a white picket fence (all of which are nice things).
Who wants to be ordinary?
The so-called “normal” or “traditional” path limits our thinking. Rather than serving as a baseline, for many it is an upper-limit goal. We spend so much time and effort trying to do things the “right” way that we miss out on something better.
- Rather than asking, “how can I graduate in four years?” ask, “how can I explore and find my dream here?”
- Rather than asking, “how can I get a job?” ask, “how can I use what I’ve learned to do something that matters to me?”
Conclusion
If you don’t already know, I’ve recently been through a major life change that involved deciding to leave a perfectly good job and moving my family across the country to try something new. I’ll be honest, it was one of the scariest decisions I’ve made. But in a world where so many people seem to be riding on conveyor belts to “Normal-ville,” stepping into the unknown feels pretty great.
After the chaos of moving across the country, I finally got a chance to sit down at a completely empty desk, with an empty to-do list, and ask what has become my favorite question:
“Well, now what?”
