Have you ever thought to yourself, “what the frig am I doing with my life,” and not had a good answer? Ever wonder what you’re going to do with your new degree in sociology? Do you parents and other family members worry about this as well?
The whole notion of graduating from school, getting a job, getting married, and settling down after college is outdated, and we’re the first real generation where the lack of absolute direction is more common to all of us then ever before.
This is only strange, though, when you look at our situation through the lens of decades popular culture and traditional values. Global free trade and the internet has put the world at our fingertips; our parent’s generation hardly dreamed of trekking through South America with a best friend from Germany that they met in a video game, or doing a year of work in Singapore. The information economy that has replaced manufacturing and traditional labor jobs has given way to jobs where you’re looked at as a weirdo if you’re at the company for more than a few years.
Sure, you probably eventually want to settle down and act like boring adults and raise a family, but the gap in the number of years between now and then is far greater than your parents likely had.
I’ve recently embraced this idea as a manifesto of sorts - embracing the lack of direction, rather than fret over it. There was an op-ed piece recently that has really helped me validate what our generation is experiencing:
So to everyone who doesn’t know where they’re going or how to go about it, don’t worry - it’s par for the course these days. Don’t let your parents convince you otherwise that your lack of direction will be your downfall. Embrace it and live your life as it comes…there isn’t a better time in the world to get out there and get on with your odyssey.
I’ve been asked before why I’m not wrestling in college. I wrote this before I graduated high school and it’s probably good to have this in my blog despite the fact that I wrote this in April 2003.
Yeah, hm, one would think colleges would be banging on my door. But several factors make up the reasons why I didn’t wrestling in college.
1) The minimum weight class in college is 125, where the guys there are like 135-140 cutting weight to get to that weight class. I’ll never be as big as any of them. They are that big even in D3 college wrestling. I’m just not big enough (i could lift more) to wrestle 125 in college.
2) I achieved everything one can acheive as a high school wrestler. I don’t really have dreams of wrestling college. When I look back at high school, the first thing and the most important thing I will always remember is wrestling. I don’t want to do the same for college. I want to look back on college as the years where I learned how to be a successful adult in society, having fun, and studying my fucking ass off. College wrestling is a huge committment which I don’t really want to committ to. It won’t get me anywhere closer to my degree.
3) Only two of the 5 schools I applied to have wrestling teams - Rennselaer Polytech and Worcester Polytech, both division 3 programs. On the national college level, I’m actually not that good a wrestler. The competition in college is unreal, even at division 3.
4) Division 3 programs can’t (afford to) offer me scholarship money for wrestling.
5) Despite my accomplishments, division 1 and 2 wrestling programs across the country don’t generally recruit wrestlers from New England. They prefer to recruit kids from PA, IA, OH, MN, NJ, and CA, states where wrestling dominates winter sports, where the competition down there would kill any wrestler from new england. Bigger/better wrestlign programs jsut aren’t interested in me.
6) I got offered a very nice academic scholarship to Northeastern University. I have a 3.65 gpa and stuff, so I wasn’t depending on my wrestling alone to get me into/through college.
From here on out, I no longer compete, I’m a college student and a high school All-American in wrestling
Thanks for asking.
So I’ve been working my new coop job at Basis Technology for the last month or so.
Just a minute ago I was sitting in the office kitchen talking with the head of IT about how .NET developer salaries are currently skyrocketing. According to him, VB.NET yearlies are going for $60k. VB.NET? Gross. I would consider myself a mid-level C#.NET developer, which he quoted at $80k. How soon till I graduate? Jeez. Who knows, though, you have to wonder if those are inflated salaries or what. CNN even confirms it. It’s no wonder the international grad students at Northeastern don’t speak a sentence that doesn’t contain some sort of phrase containing “.NET” in it when talking about jobs. They know where the money is going!
And while I was having this conversation, someone else walked into the room and commented on the fact that I was chatting it up, “You are the most outgoing intern!”. The head of the IT replied “Well, that’s why he actually has a girlfriend!” Pretty funny. But this leads me to a bigger issue that I’ve been mulling over for a little while now.
I am extroverted. Maybe I wasn’t when I was younger and wasn’t the most popular kid in school, but these days I most definitely am. My personal friends have attested to this without a doubt. And I’m a minority at my current coop. Basis’ software does some pretty technical things in regards to linguistic and computational analysis. My supervisor correlated this with the high number of introverted-types of people working here - the more technical the software company, the more introverted the [developers] company is. I mean, I could go the whole day without speaking to anybody if I wanted to. I find myself initiating most “hellos” in passing, for example. People tend to look at the ground when walking around the office, and I know it’s not because they’re sad. Perhaps this can be attributed to the fact that many here are of non-western nationalities, where eye contact is socially disrespectful.
It’s not that bad, though, but I wish my work area actually had the lights on. The nearby developers seem to enjoy 24/7 darkness. Not me. I might even be feeling the hints of seasonal depression from it? Okay, maybe not, but when it’s cloudy outside I might as well be in a room with no windows.
Everyone here is friendly, though, and I’ve been kept busy doing some engaging JSP database driven linguistic as well as business oriented web application projects. But I’ve already started to pick up on the fact that this may not be the kind of company I’d want to work in for the long run - I need to be working with more extroverted types. I don’t have a specialty niche (financial, linguistics, graphics, robotics, etc.) type of software I am focused in on (yet).
I think, after graduation, the first job I should seek should be with a software consulting company. I have a broad range of talents that can be applied for diverse projects and I’m extroverted and work well with people. I think I’d get the most out of my talents in that kind of environment.
But this is exactly what coop is all about - find out about yourself and about what kind of place you’d like to work at after college or grad school. I’m glad I’m able to figure it out now instead of going to a 4-year school and then be stuck in an entry level position for years at some company that turned out to not fit my personality and skills properly.
In two years im probably going to do a major evaluation of my finances and decide between one of the following things:
a) Travel, see the world, put of being a full time working stiff to get a better appreciation of the world and what I want to do with the rest of my life.
b) Lay out my career goals and decide if going to graduate school is something that is necessary to achieve them.
c) Work full time for a year or two to save up some money such that I can make a better decision about a and b.
I have approximately 2 days left to finish my job here at Pyxis Mobile. I have worked full time here for almost 9 months now, 6 of those months counting towards co-op, the other 3 my last summer break of college. Over that time I have worked for the Professional Services, the Development, and finally the Quality Assurance teams. When I say worked full time, I was probably in the office for 10 hours a day on average, but I often played a bit of foosball or did personal things on the internet in that extra hour or more that I stayed in the office. I’ve taken only one week off in this entire stretch, heading down to Myrtle Beach with my girlfriend to catch some rays.
I was washing my hands in the bathroom today, and I looked at my reflection in the mirror, and experienced a disconnection from my physical self that I have only felt once before, also while looking in the mirror. I was shocked. Who is that in the mirror? Is that me? For a few moments, my ego didn’t recognize the physical form in which it resides. That’s my face? Shortly after returning to the office, I was talking to one of my coworkers about something. In the back of my mind, all of a sudden, I began to wonder, “Whose voice is that coming out of your face?” I was discomforted by the thought and hurriedly told myself that I am me.
So what the hell just happened? My best guess is that I’m starting to lose my “individual ego”, or my “sense of who me is” as a result of the drastic reduction in personal time I have alone with my thoughts. My life’s been flying by and haven’t had a chance notice that I’m changing too.
I think seeing the fruit of my own intellegence and experiencing life comme il est is enough of a motivator to ignore the intrinsic meaninglessness of existence in the universe.
I sleep later now in the morning because I know the exact routine in order every day to get ready before work without wasting any time deliberating what I have left to get done before I walk out the front door. This kind of routine - is good.
Alissa plainly tells me that routine is a good thing. I can’t seem to bring myself to agree, because the mantra to “experience life to the fullest, see new things, travel the world, do the unexpected, live spontaneously!” is still clinging to me from being a teenager. But I no longer am one, and I’ll be 21 before this year is over. A full fledged adult according to the US of A. The only restriction I can think of beyond 21 is that car rentals cost extra if you are under 25.
So, yes, legally, in most countries of the world, I am an adult. In my mind, I’m not completely ready to give in forever for daily routines that never change. I was unofficially asked if I would like to work full time for my present co-op job, at Pyxis Mobile in Waltham recently. For a few reasons, including the one above, I politely unofficially declined. For one, my work is worth more if I graduate from school. A degree makes me employable at many other places besides Pyxis. Two, working full time is one hell of a preview of what I might have to look forward to for the rest of my working adult life - the fact that I have very little time for myself; For 5 out of the 7 days a week, I will be looking forward to the weekend. The money I would be making is tempting and would certianly be beyond what most 20 year olds make these days, but I really don’t need money. Even though I’m not sure exactly how college will be paid off, I know eventually with loans it will get taken care of. What I do need is to cling on to the last of my young adult life. I want to travel. I want to have fun. I want excitement, instability, and unpredictablity. I want to make sure I’m still curious about what’s out there in the world. Not that my current job isn’t exciting, but in a different sense than what I’m speaking of. I know quite a few of my friends who are also on co-op right now are also experiencing this sentiment in some form or another, and some of them are definitely not handling it very well. What does it take to break a youthful mind into a working-class adult?
I can’t settle for the day-in-day-out routine just yet! The advice I seem to hear wispered to me more and more to “not start work immediately after graduating” and to “not graduate fast” seems to take on more meaning these days.
