In participating in Module One of Insights to Impacts, a couple of keynotes stood out to me, the first being that adaptability and flexibility in terms of thinking of your career are essential as well as understanding the motivation behind your studies and “life-long goals.” To me, the message of knowing that life and career decisions, like in the apple game metaphor, aren’t necessarily best to approach with pure logic, rather, sometimes you have to pick up on external context clues or think thoroughly about the best way to approach a given situation. It was helpful to think about the analogy of a coffee shop and how inevitably every coffee shop that you enter will inherently be different, but you can use past knowledge, and three different insights such as the hypothetical one, to gauge how to best order coffee, or go about your assigned tasks. I think that an important takeaway here is that no matter how familiar you are with something, you always need to approach it knowing there will be variability in every scenario you approach.
In terms of understanding one’s motivations, it was influential to think about the psychological impact of the difference between doing something that you’re truly passionate about and something that you think you should do or something that others expect you to do. It made me think about how capitalism, the desire to earn as much money as possible and create a “successful” life for you and your loved ones, can discourage us from pursuing passions that might not traditionally be seen as “rigorous.” It was also interesting to think about how being “good” at something has such an impact on the career that one may end up choosing, again I feel this is associated with the desire to scale the ranks and become more “successful.” The story of the girl who decided to go to law school since she didn’t want to go to medical school resonated with me because I often am questioning what I want to do and think I default to stereotypical education models, as I know in the future that I want to be “respected.”
The problem with being so young and having to apply to all these colleges and universities is that you genuinely, at least in my case, have no clue what you’re doing, yet you’re making a huge decision in establishing what your future career might hold. While it’s nearly impossible to feel like your life decisions build up themselves, it’s essential to practice stepping back to periodically reassessing your goals and well-being to allow you to be best prepared for your future. Being able to acknowledge that your emotional well-being is a crucial component of success is critical.
