We’re really pressured to get on a career track from an early age. Ever since I was five years old, people have asked me what I want to be when I grow up. I may have started as an astronaut-princess, but once I started high school and started my search for college, I began to dread that loaded question.
You see, I wanted to major in English. Any time I told a nosy relative, curious teacher, or meddlesome neighbour my college ambitions, I was asked, in a voice dripping with false concern and snark: “What do you want to do with that, teach?”
Let’s not even get me started on the fact that teaching IS in fact a valuable and legitimate profession. The truth is I had no idea what I wanted to be when I grew up. I was 16! Hell, I still don’t know. What I did know back then was that I loved literature. I wanted to swim in semicolons, wade through metaphors, and go to bed every night dreaming of allusions. Spending four years with Charles Dickens, Shakespeare, and Don Dellilo sounded like absolute heaven. But all those questions still kept nagging me: “Is my college heaven going to turn into my career hell?”
Science or humanities, university or community college, what we want to do when we’re too young to even drive somehow becomes our destiny. What I don’t think our parents, teachers, and neighbors get is that a college degree isn’t supposed to train you for a vocation, at least not most of the time. What major really provides a direct path to a career? Besides maybe engineering, accounting, and nursing (all of which require further certification) most majors require either a graduate degree, or on-the-job training in a related field. Take bio-chem for example. This “serious” science would make my Dad drool, but what job future is there without an MD or PhD? Not much, unless you want to work in a lab as an assistant for 15 dollars an hour for the rest of your life.
And frankly, if I meet one more “marketing” major, I’m going to shoot myself in the face. These dufuses spend four years reading case studies, learning elementary statistics, and working on “presentations” the likes of which compare to an 11th grade group history project. And yet somehow my college education was riddled with their arrogant chant that they would be making money after graduation, while I would be serving them coffee in between their high-powered business meetings. Puh-lease. Newsflash: entry-level marketing jobs pay crap. Also, and this comes from personal experience working in marketing with *gasp!* An English major, everything you need to know you can learn in 6-months on the job. Statistics? Take a course in college (I also majored in the highly profitable field of sociology). Presentations? Those nights marketing students spent trying to come up with a “new soft-drink for CocaCola” with 4 other students were better spent playing beer-pong. Try and come up with a way to promote a small business, with no other staff then yourself, and zero budget. Now that’s a presentation.
Most academic universities, as opposed to specialized vocational colleges, are not designed to provide you with career training. And frankly, most jobs out there do not need 4 years of training to be done. Still, most professions require a bachelor’s degree. So while you’re stressing about “what to do with your life,” chill. Study something you actually like, do well in it, and see what job you can get after graduation. Chances are it won’t have anything to do with your degree anyway.
