Member-only story
Dream (Job) Deferred
How I found success professionally during a global pandemic
Three years ago, I was a sophomore in college. Having changed my major three times, jumping from undecided to political science then journalism after stopping for a brief detour to pursuing a screenwriting major, I found myself struggling to articulate my goals.
The spring semester of your sophomore year is traditionally supposed to be your “decision” semester, or last chance to decide your major and future studies. I felt like I had spent the majority of my time in school in a kind of ennui, ricocheting from department to department like some kind of pinball. There was no one thing that interested me, and the thought of tethering myself to one to two courses of study was terrifying.
The truth was I had never given much thought to what my dream job would be, and I had this idea in my head that what you study in college is what you end up doing later. My parents were from a generation where growing in your career meant graduating with a degree in a specific field then starting from rung one and climbing the corporate ladder in a given field until you made it to the top. Their careers were essentially the only examples I had of what it might mean to enter the professional world, so I never considered that a growth opportunity in your career might present itself as something other than a promotion…
