Volume CXXXIII, Number 19 March 29, 2002 f

What are you going to do with your life?
GENEVIVE CREEDON

I have a niece who is a junior in high school right now and is agonizing over college. She doesn't buy the idea that college isn't worth worrying about, as I'm sure most of us similarly did not.

Choosing where to go to college is probably the only decision towards which I have ever been apathetic. It simply didn't matter to me.

I won't say whether or not I was right, but most people pitied my point of view. They wondered how I wasn't excited about such a major decision, but as far as I was concerned, all schools were fairly similar.

Like seniors in high school facing college, most college seniors have either a general idea of what they're going to do after graduation or are scurrying to find out. I asked someone a question today that I, myself, cannot answer: "What do you wish to do with your life?"

Within the first three words, the answer entailed a job of some sort. Most people's answers would likely entail future plans, but those aren't the right answers to the question.

Even before we join the workforce, we define our lives and ourselves by jobs. We're pre-med, pre-law, pre-fill-in-the-blank. It's a cycle that follows us indefinitely, it seems. In high school, everyone wants to know where we're going to college. As we enter college, everyone wants to know what our major will be. As we leave college, everyone wants to know what we're going to do to make a living.

Those questions are all valid. Certainly we have to answer them at some point, but should they really be the first priorities? By the time I'm a senior, my goal is not to be able to tell anyone what job or graduate school awaits me. It is to be able to say what life awaits me.

I tell my niece every day that she has nothing to worry about in the college process. She should enjoy it and find the medium between freaking out and being completely apathetic towards it.

And the question "What do you wish to do with your life?" really shouldn't be any more stressful. The ideal answer is different for each one of us, which is certainly the way it should be, but I'd like to think that most of us do not want our lives to be defined merely by our schools, our majors, or our jobs.