The cliché phrases abundant in life, while unexciting and lacking on the surface, quietly reveal great and potentially terrifying truths. The one cliché incessantly told to college students is that college is about discovering your interests and passions; it’s about discovering who you are; it’s about becoming who you think you want to be in life.
I’m fairly certain every student on a college campus is tired of hearing that banal phrase and would prefer to gorge themselves on Netflix and Chipotle (with guac) rather than ponder about their future. I warn you, though: By not thinking about your future and not heeding the advice of that cliché by exploring your interests and passions, you will not be the person you want to be, living the life you dreamed of in class.
Around 83 percent of college graduates in the spring of 2014 had jobs upon walking across the stage. That statistic does not take into consideration whether the job is full-time or part-time, low-paying or high-paying, or in a field they are actually interested in. The sad truth is the vast majority of employment after college is for extremely low-pay with horrible hours in fields that are wholly irrelevant to what ?you studied.
Imagine studying an academic area that you think will be doing for the rest of your life and are enamored with and constantly call your parents about and refuse to talk about anything else on Thanksgiving because you don’t want more buttered rolls or cranberry chutney, you want to recite your study notes from all your awesome classes so far – and then doing nothing related to it at all and wondering what the ?hell happened.
I call that a nightmare, and more and more college students are living that out right now, but that does not necessarily mean it should happen to you. Really think introspectively about what you actually want to do in broad strokes and explore industries that cater to those interests. Utilize the Career Services Center and ask them to connect you to alumni in fields that interest you, and shoot them an e-mail with a nice “Roll Tide” as the farewell – seriously, do it. Alumni are extremely ?generous with their time and want to help any and all UA students in any capacity they can.
Engage with your peers who have had internships in areas that interest you and learn from them. Learn how the job and internship application and interview process works, how the resume needs to be formatted and how the interviews at X company differ from Y company. Make a concerted effort to actually think hard about what industries excite you and where you want to be in the future, and go out and work for it. Every hour you spend binging on Netflix, some other student is calling contacts, sending resumes out and stealing that job ?from you.
The process of discovering and landing that dream career is not easy, and it should not be easy. Do not be afraid to fail in this endeavor and utilize all available resources on the UA campus. I truly believe there are immeasurable rewards – ?pecuniary and personally – for ?putting forth concerted effort in thinking about life after college and preparing for it in every ?possible way.
Patrick Crowley is the Opinions Editor of The Crimson White.
