Choosing your major is exciting. There’s something special about setting the course for the next two, three, four, or fifty years of your life. But are we really ever setting a course?
With the multitudinous skills, interests, and passions that we bring to the table in college, it’s difficult to think of our career as a single path, as a set course. It’s more like a continuum of paths that twist, turn, and morph with every decision we make.
Thus we can start to explore these passions we bring to the table by exposing ourselves to new states of mind, new people and their cultures, new trains of thought, and new experiences.
Here’s some advice that has helped me shape my career path:
1. Don’t limit yourself to classes within your major. Take advantage of Rochester’s cluster system as a positive asset and delve into a field of study you’ve always wanted to learn more about. For instance, my major is optical engineering, but I have a passion for French language, so I did my cluster in French literature.
2. Take independent studies. If there is a specific topic you heard in a class, you read in an article, or you heard during a talk, and you’d like to explore it in more depth, then independent study is the perfect opportunity to carry out research under a professor’s supervision outside of the curriculum. For more info on how to do this, you can ready my previous post on independent studies!
I’ve done independent studies on biomedical optics (intraocular lenses), photoacoustic imaging to detect prostate cancer, and solar energy concentration using mirrors. Pretty different topics, huh?
3. Travel abroad. Whether it’s for a study abroad program, to attend scientific conferences, to volunteer at a non-profit, or just for the pleasure of exploring, immerse yourself in a different culture for an extended period of time. You will most likely be exposed to lifestyles radically different from your own, and this will enrich the perspectives for your career.
Ultimately, you are choosing which lifestyle to pursue, since the lines between personal life and career are becoming increasingly blurred.