“So what are your career goals?”, the interviewer asked me. I sat there and thought and honestly didn’t know how to answer his question. The job I was interviewing for was a temporary position, so being asked such a heavy-weighted question threw me off. When I realized I couldn’t come up with an answer, I started thinking about my life and the choices I’ve made up until now.
I’m 24, took 5 years of college, and landed a job at a school as an aid. The two other aids I work with didn’t have any education past high school and are significantly older than me. The job paid decently, but the other staff members liked to point out how I’m over qualified and under paid and how I could do so much more with my young life.
I had been sort of bummed with the job, considering I probably could do so much more and something more satisfying. Then when I was in the interview for the temporary position, it really hit me. I started to feel like I wasted 5 years of my life, 5 years of something I should have gained from, 5 years worth of money down the drain. I became pretty depressed and wondered how I could have let this happen. How could I have gone through all this school and still not have found something I really wanted to do? I thought school would have helped me find my passion in life.
I realized what I had really wanted to do seemed a little far-fetched for where I live, which is in a small rural area in Indiana. I wanted to write. Even if it was just for a newspaper or magazine I always thought it’d be fun to be able to write for money. I wanted to find a career that’d I love, not something that I was doing just to make some money to make it by, bouncing from one odd job to another. I still feel a little lost, but who doesn’t feel that way from time to time.
Bibliosmia 