CREDIT: SHUTTER_M ON THINKSTOCK
Finding the career path that will lead to success and happiness is a confusing one; take the time to truly understand the pathway before you make the choice.

“Repent! Repent,” he yelled. “You don’t know what you’re doing,” adding more to the unexpected scene, “Please people! Believe me! This is not the path you want to go through; I have gone down it and it’s not what you think; this is not a life you want for yourself,” he continued tearing his Marvel t-shirt as people went by giving him weird looks and laughing. What this individual was trying to get across was to take time to think before choosing a career path and to choose one that will end up in a job one can love and prosper in.

The fact that many of us never know what we’re getting into when we choose a career path is a fact. We never do the research; we don’t talk to field professionals; we don’t ask questions about what matters to us; we don’t know what we’re actually going to do once we get into the job. We’re blindly following our gut, which at the moment doesn’t fully comprehend the importance of this life-decision.

Just seeing a movie or contemplating another person who is performing their profession in front of us might be motivation enough to get us off our seat and then write some life-contract because it is only consequential that we will dedicate time, resources, relationships, everything we have to this impulse we had one day. Maybe we weren’t that convinced but we said, “Yes I do”, to our marriage with our career.

And so, we enter the rabbit hole of our career. We find people among peoples, ideas upon ideas, pathways, secrets, depictions, performances, numbers, designs, creativeness, all that pleases the eyes just to encounter that many of us are left unpleased; when we encounter just what we tried to avoid, our hearts and minds go in with us desiring to explore these feelings of accomplishment, of satisfaction, or freedom, of passion, of dedicated love from yourself into reality and into life but we only realize that this is a vastness exploration into the unknown.

If only someone could have told me, “No, you should consider the full picture, stop in your tracks, you’re young, this is too much of a rush to simply let yourself into it, not everything is what it seems.”

The long hours lost to the greed of others, to the ambition of others, to dedicate your efforts to the dreams of others. Don’t forfeit yourself to your life. Get involved in it, into the process of thinking it through. Do the research, talk to people, go to the conferences, read the posts about what it is like to live in a career and find the career you are actually interested in.

But most importantly, don’t be the person who screamed in frustration about what they wished they had known when they chose what career path to follow.
Editorial opinions or comments expressed in this online edition of Interrobang newspaper reflect the views of the writer and are not those of the Interrobang or the Fanshawe Student Union. The Interrobang is published weekly by the Fanshawe Student Union at 1001 Fanshawe College Blvd., P.O. Box 7005, London, Ontario, N5Y 5R6 and distributed through the Fanshawe College community. Letters to the editor are welcome. All letters are subject to editing and should be emailed. All letters must be accompanied by contact information. Letters can also be submitted online by clicking here.