The commencement of my search for a dream job

I’ve started a countdown.

I now have 71 days until I graduate from UCLA. And counting.

I should be excited, right?

I should be waiting for commencement with anxious excitement. It should be one of my happiest moments. After all, it’s a goal I have strived for since elementary school.

But instead, I’m dreading June 15. In fact, I’m scared.

I have no idea what I’m going to do when I graduate from UCLA.

I didn’t expect this to happen. After all, the answer should be easy. Having grown up in an upper-middle-class community, I’ve been taught from a young age to do whatever makes me happy ““ to follow my dreams.

But part of the problem comes in figuring out what those dreams are. And working out how to support myself until I do find out what makes me happy.

And I had expected to find the answer to that question here ““ at UCLA.

But instead, UCLA has neither made this process easy, nor the answers accessible.

I entered UCLA undeclared. And then I spent my first year skipping around taking random classes from random departments, trying to figure out what it was that made me happy.

Eventually I decided on mathematics, but I knew from early on that math wasn’t going to be my career. It was simply what I enjoyed doing in college, nothing more.

For a while I appeased my anxiety by deciding that I was going to join Teach for America. However, after my recent interview, which didn’t go ideally, I started questioning exactly why I wanted to join.

I didn’t want to teach high school math just because I couldn’t think of something better to do postgraduation. If I was going to do something time-consuming, I wanted it to be something that I really wanted to do, or at least on a path to something I wanted to do.

But I’m drawing a blank on what that would be.

So come commencement, I’m going to be just as lost as I was on my first day on campus, if not more so.

Of course, there’s always the option of getting a menial job ““ something that will give me time on the side to think and develop what it is that I really want to do. But getting a job out of college that I could have gotten out of high school just seems a little pointless. It makes me wonder exactly what my college career was for.

I made a quick stop at the career center for a drop-in appointment to seek help for my inability to make decisions.

They pointed me to a Web site where I could set up interviews with people in careers and talk to them to see if what they did was something I might enjoy. They also pointed me to a section of their collection of books with titles like “101 Careers for Math Majors.”

I continued on to the undergraduate office of the math department. They had a small list of internships and tutoring positions meant for current students, but nothing for graduating seniors. When I asked, they suggested that I go to the career center.

None of this was helpful ““ I already knew most of the jobs related to my major, I just wasn’t especially interested in them. I was looking for an easy answer to what I am going to do after I graduate, how I am going to support myself, and what I am going to do with my life.

But UCLA can’t, and isn’t meant to, answer my life questions. It’s my dilemma, not UCLA’s.

Searching job ads only reaffirmed that I need experience or a certification of some kind to even be considered for many jobs. These are both things that UCLA didn’t directly supply me with.

And while I could have simply started applying in the hopes of getting something, I was scared of being stuck in something that wasn’t for me. Finding myself in 20 years stuck in some job that I had found just because I didn’t know what else to do after I graduated sounds like my worst nightmare.

As I was growing more anxious over my lack of postgraduation plans I realized that I would have to change my expectations.

I needed to accept the fact that not knowing what my dream job is isn’t a problem. Maybe my life has been so jam-packed with goals such as graduating high school and college that I haven’t had time to figure out exactly what it is that I enjoy.

Maybe taking time off to work a job that requires few skills, and that I could have gotten out of high school, is the best possible thing.

After all, that way I’ll still have plenty of time to be happy.

E-mail job offers to Loewenstein at [email protected]. Send general comments to [email protected].