Lately, I’ve been thinking about the future after college since I’m getting kind of closer to the end of my college experience. Not that it’s extremely close, but since recruiting for summer is often during fall, you have to think somewhat in advance. So I’ve spent a lot of time talking to new grads at different companies asking them about their experience and their career goals and their life goals. And it’s been very interesting listening to different people’s goals and what they want out of life.
It’s interesting that after college, you now have all of this freedom to choose what you want to do with your life. Sure, from high school to college, you have more options as well, but there are things you have to do in college. I talked to a Lyft new grad who put it very nicely, that now, no one is telling you which brass rings to grab next. No one tells you what’s the next ladder rung to step on. We’ve been given what the next step to take to be successful: it’s always been get good grades in high school and take as many AP tests, to get into a good college to find your interests, then get more good grades, get as many internship offers, and then…what? What does it mean to be successful from there? You then have all of these options of what you could do, but no one can really tell you what you should do. It really depends on your life goals and which option aligns mostly with your goals. You get to decide how much each factor of life matters to you.
And I think it’s important that you don’t just follow other people’s priorities or what everyone else seems to think. Try to find out what you really want so that you don’t end up living a life that is great by someone else’s standards. Do you want the highest salary out of college? Is there a specific mission/purpose that you'd like to contribute? Do you want to travel and explore the world? Do you want flexibility to choose to do whatever you want? Do you want to be surrounded by a lot of friends after college or move somewhere by yourself? What experiences are you trying to have?
It’s interesting to look back on my college experience so far and see how my goals have changed over time. At the beginning, my main priority was getting good grades to declare computer science. And doing well in school was everything. And after declaring computer science, in addition to doing well in school, I also was focused on getting a good internship offer. But after declaring computer science, grades had less importance which was then replaced with my recruiting priorities. And now, I’m in this interesting stage where I’m interested in making really close friends that I’ll for even after college. Of course, grades and recruiting will matter (as they should), but I’ve been thinking more about things outside of career goals as well since work isn’t everything. But it’s also that I’ve been able to be in a position (due to a lot of hard work and luck) where I can care about other things like friendships. I like looking back and seeing my transition through only caring through grades into become more…human. If that’s the right word.
I realize that this post is similar to my Optimizing for Life post. But this post is more focused on that at some point, there are going to be no next concrete steps to take to achieve what you want out of life. No one's going to tell you what to do. It's up to you to define what success is and how you can get there.
Spend some time finding what you want out of life and if what you’re doing is contributing to those factors. Because you don’t want to be in senior year of college ready to go into the real world never having thought about these decisions, and then making these decisions in such a small time frame.