Tackling a hard question, overwhelming question? Well, the first thing to do is to try to make the question easier to answer. Right?
So here's my initial game plan: we're gonna break the big question—what should I be when I grow up?—into smaller bite-sized pieces. Likewise, I'll do a deep dive on what I don't want to be, and how I came to this career crossroads. That gives us two main tracks: 1) what do I want to be when I grow up, exploring ways to identify work/career paths; and 2) what I don't want to be when I grow up, examining how and why I decided to leave my professor job.
What do I WANT to be? (Track 1)
We'll explore a bunch of different ways a person can try to figure out what they want to do.
Do I think the answer to this question lies at the end of a Google search? No. But isn't that where most of us go first when we're we don't know the answer to a question these days?
So, I'll ask Google, talk to an AI chatbot (even though I don't want to), follow directions on college career center sites, and maybe even schedule time with a career coach (well, first I'll need to find a career coach...).
I bet there are a bunch of existing strategies/workbooks out there to help people answer these questions, but I also want to feel this out my way. So, I suspect I am going to go rogue and make up my own strategies along the way. My gut instinct says I need to examine my values, skills, constraints, and capacity as part of this process, so you can expect to read about these concepts soon.
Hell, I was even thinking about working through the curriculum from a class I took in college focused on careers (yes, I still have a paper copy of the syllabus from 2013's organization studies course the Nature of Work course when I was an undergrad at Pitzer).
Hopefully all of that gives a sense of what to look out for in the posts to come.
GOALS for What I WANT to be? (Track 1):
Get some clarity on what I want to do next.
Leave actionable breadcrumbs on how to answer this question for other people (whether it's the first time you're figuring out what you want to be or the fourteenth).
Entertain some people along by documenting my struggles.
What I DON'T want to be! (Track 2)
Misery loves company. I would love it if I can help any folks stuck in career-misery feel a little less alone. Plus, I know there is valuable information about what I want to be hidden in the debris of what I was.
If we're being totally honest here, I never wanted to be a professor. And I know I am not the only person who has followed a path they didn't want to be on only to find themselves suffering. Examining the toll this kind of choice takes on a person's mental and physical health, and how a person comes to term with making a different choice seems like a struggle worth sharing.
With the state of academia these days (in the U.S. and around the world), I'm not the only one who is (or will be) trying to figure out what comes next after higher ed.
GOALS for What I DON'T want to be! (Track 2):
Help out anyone who is struggling to make a big, difficult, life-changing decision through documenting how I decided to leave my last job/career.
Identify clues about what I should look for and what I should avoid in my next career.
(maybe also complain a bit about the state of higher education/education as an industry as well...).
BONUS: What YOU want to be? (Track 3?) I
n the future, I'd love to add interviews where I ask people in all sorts of different careers what they wanted to be when they grew up, what they ended up pursuing for work, and how their answer to that question changed over time. Maybe I'll even interview some kids!
I've got even more ideas for things to write about, like investigating the role of higher ed and college majors and trade school in helping people figure out what they want to be, but I don't want to get ahead of myself. So, we'll start with our initial game plan. Once I get into a rhythm, I'd love to add these interviews into the mix.
What are YOUR goals?
Is there something you'd like me to try or to investigate? IS there something you want to learn when reading this blog?
Let me know!
I'd love to hear from you, to know what you've tried and where you've gotten stuck when figuring out what you want to be when you grow up.
