Picture this: it’s the beginning of your last semester at one of the top universities in the world, all of your friends have perfectly-composed resumes with consistent and impressive work experience, and some of your friends already have career-developing jobs lined up. Every conversation you have with anybody immediately shifts to this “job” thing and when you tell them you really don’t even know where to begin, they turn you to another job-seeking website or app which you know will only have either unpaid internship positions or applications open for corporate CEOs. You’re graduating with a degree that has absolutely no application to what you actually want to do, but you’re also unsure of what it is you actually want to do. And you haven’t updated your resume in a year. And you don’t even really know how to make a resume. Your perfect-resume friends help you out until they realize there’s nothing they can do to help, and the past four years flash before your eyes as you too realize there is nothing you can do to help yourself at this point.
This may be a familiar situation to many (unless you are or were much like the perfect-resume friend, then this entire rant shall not ever apply to you!) — and it is a terrible and anxiety-inducing situation indeed. Every waking moment is inundated by regret and I cannot erase the overwhelmingly vivid image in my mind of my current situation. Of course, this is far from the end of the world, though somehow it feels like it is. It’s as if the decisions I make now will change the course of my future forever. It’s as if I’m permanently stuck in a mentality where taking a big risk is too risky but holding back is also too risky so I may as well just stay in place.
But someone recently asked me something interesting, which gave me a bit of perspective. They asked, “what is the end goal?”, and to be honest, I really had to think about it. I don’t know what it is — not exactly. I can see a vague outline of many potential futures, though I find myself constantly shuffling between them, unsure of which one will yield a life I think is worth living. And I don’t want to spend the rest of my life sitting at a desk or working for a company whose graphics I hate.
Nothing seems quite right and no potential end goal seems attainable. Maybe my standards are too high or maybe I lack the confidence necessary to take any risks. I might be too narrow-minded in my search for employment, and perhaps I should take alternative routes in the next few years rather than following in the footsteps of my perfect-resume friends who may very well want to sit a desk for the rest of their lives. And there’s nothing wrong with that, we all have our own end goals.
My end goal is really simple, even though it’s pretty complicated. I’d like to have fun and make things I feel I need to make. This end goal does not translate into a corporate job in any spatial dimension, but I must remind myself that I don’t need to have a corporate job in order to achieve my end goal. The two are totally incompatible. But the jobs on Indeed and Handshake and every single other work platform are not my only options! I need to expand my mind and set my creativity loose. The ultimate design problem is the design of the path toward The end goal. And I shall never forget that form follows function.