What happened to the days of “You don’t need to know what you want to do with your life just yet”. All the way through secondary school, even through college, we were told this constantly. GCSE subject choices aren’t the be-all and end-all, you don’t need to know what you’re going to do with your life just yet. A-Level choices are fairly important but don’t get too stressed, you’ve still got plenty of time to decide what you want to do.
You get to uni and then BAM, you’re surrounded by careers advisors and work experience and “This Will Be My Life”. “This Will Be My Life” is haunting me, and if you ever have to do it, chances are it will haunt you too. It’s looking ahead five years or ten years and describing what your life will be like if everything has gone your way – I’m assuming, from the way we were discouraged from saying that we’d won the lottery, that it is to encourage motivation rather than a “What would you do if you had all the money in the world?” kind of question.
I’ve been notoriously bad at deciding what I want to do with my life for as long as I can remember. I mean, when I was younger, I wanted to be a teacher, Fireman Sam, a dog, a nurse, an actress, a journalist, a historian, a writer, and so many other things. Most kids grow out of that, but I didn’t. All through secondary school and college, I cycled through potential careers like there was no tomorrow – lawyer, journalist, writer, English teacher, play therapist, nurse, children’s nurse, paramedic, policewoman, army nurse, so many different options and yet none of them ever really jumped out at me in the sense that I knew instantly, YES – THAT’S WHAT I WANT TO DO.
I always envied my friends who had such clear-cut ideas of what they wanted to do. The ones who wanted to be doctors, or lawyers, or bankers, and they knew that was the only career for them, and from GCSEs onwards they had such clear-cut ideas of how they were going to achieve that. I hated the way I drifted through, trying different things, testing the waters and thinking “Maybe” all the time, but never really knowing for certain. I’m sure there’s several blog posts on here where I’ve said “This is definitely what I want to do, and nothing is going to change my mind”. That’s all well and good, but it isn’t true, and nor is it healthy – because when you find that actually, you want to do something different, the sense of panic when you realize you’re completely unprepared is horrendous.
I know so many people who’ve dreamed of being doctors or lawyers their whole lives, and they’ve never entertained the idea of doing anything else, and they’re so set in their ways that when that one anomalous module grade results in four or five missed offers, and countless interviews and aptitude tests and BMATs and UKCATs and LNATs prove worthless when you get that e-mail and find out that it hasn’t gone your way, it’s like their entire lives crumble around them. I’m pleased to say that most of them have found a Plan B and are successful, but nothing is worth that moment of heartbreak when everything falls down around you.
So, from now on, I will not say “This is definitely what I want to do”. At the moment, my desire is to be a primary school teacher – particularly in the nursery/reception/key stage one age, working with really small children. I’m fairly determined in this – to the extent that I’ve already started doing practice aptitude tests, and I’m considering re-sitting my GCSE Maths to give me the best chance possible – but I know that nothing’s definite. Things change, and that’s just a fact of life.
So, if you’re in school and college, and you’re sick of being told “You’ve got plenty of years”, don’t be too eager to plan your career down to the last dot. You could be the most prepared, determined candidate in the world, but one false slip at an interview, or a mis-read question in an exam, could make you feel like your whole world is ending, and it isn’t worth that hassle. I’m not saying be like me – drift through life with only a vague idea of what you want to do – but find a nice middle ground. Prepare yourself for the career you want – but be prepared to have a re-think.
the life of a moomin 