I played by the rules: I studied hard, got good grades, graduated from college and landed a good job at a good company. Initially, I was hungry to climb the corporate ladder and quickly earned a reputation of being a top performer. But deep inside of me, nothing stirred. The mundanity of each work day slowly gnawed away at my soul, and my heart swelled with regrets. My disenchantment with corporate America became apparent when, after being in the workforce for a couple of years, I bumped into an old college friend who asked me with worry in her eyes, “What happened to you? You used to have more life.”
I wasn’t the only one though. Among many of my college friends, an existential crisis of sorts was well underway. “Is this it? Is this what life is? How come no one told us it would be like this?” we’d hopelessly ask each other. Forefront in our minds, we wondered what the hell we had spent our time doing in college. Wasn’t college, after all, the place where we were supposed to have found ourselves, and the place that should have prepared us for the real world?
The two most pressing issues on my agenda in college were: what am I going to major in? and what job do I want after college? These are important questions in the college experience, and I have a hunch that many other students also ardently set about to answer these two critical questions as I did. However, I believe that the way in which these questions are framed — very direct and very narrow — constrain the mind to a limited number of predefined majors and job descriptions: predefined possibilities. We fixate so much on these two questions in college that it’s often at the expense of other more insightful and useful questions...
Excerpt from post originally published on Madame Noire.