A lot of university students pick a major with the aim of landing a good job. Computer science and engineering offer the promise of handsome, steady paychecks — art history, sociology, and philosophy do not.
Regardless, more than half of college graduates end up working in a field unrelated to their major.
(As a writer who took a science degree, I am part of that statistic.)
I’ve noticed many of the straight-A students I knew haven’t been able to replicate that success outside of school. This makes me think of two things.
First, the obvious: Life takes unpredictable turns, no matter how much you may study, or how good at studying you may be. Sometimes effort is moot.
Second and more importantly, it occurs to me that getting straight A’s demands its pound of flesh. Save for the geniuses, top-scoring students have to live in the library — which means sacrificing personal interests for the near-term goal of a grade.
To be clear, there are scenarios in which grades are actually part of a long-term goal, like getting into medical or law school. Grades, too, can be an easy gauge for employers to determine entry-level job candidates, and there’s also a positive status associated with good grades that can influence who you hangout with and date.
Still, I do think grades convince a sizable share of smart, ambitious students to ignore what they are most interested in. That is not a good thing. People try harder and go further when they are working on problems they gravitate to. Curiosity is a far more lasting motivator than some external metric.
Curiosity is what makes work not feel like work. Ideally, education would be optimized for this.
That would mean young adults could spend more time working on what they like, and becoming more skilled at doing what they liked — which ultimately would make them more likely to find success in the job market doing what they liked. It’d be a lot easier to greenlight the platitude “follow your passion” if we knew there’d be ample time and guidance.
Even if all that happened, not everyone can pinpoint what they are interested in. Picking a major with confidence — and attempting to extrapolate it into a multi-decade career — is effectively impossible when you’re 19.
This is also getting harder by the day given that professions are sprouting faster than dandelions. Every few years, new fields arise that we couldn’t even conceive of the prior decade (see: The Rise of AI).
There’s a strong case to be made that those who do best in school are those who know what they are interested in from a young age. Then, when they are presented with the opportunity to specialize in it with a major, it’s a no-brainer.
The work doesn’t feel like work to those students.
It wasn’t clear to me when I was 19, but I learned later that I fell into this extremely lucky cohort — I always loved reading. I read everyday for hours, and that gave me a knack for writing early on. I regularly wrote my friends’ and roommates’ papers. It was both fun and easy for me.
I’ll admit some people paid me. But mostly, I did it for free.
By the time I graduated, I knew I wanted to be a writer because I spent most of my time doing it anyway.
When I started this website after college, I wrote 100 essays before making my first dollar. I gained further evidence I was doing what suited me because earning a steady paycheck didn’t give me any additional motivation.
All this seems to point out how certain intellectual tasks are easy and fun to some people, but can feel like work to others. If there’s something you want to volunteer for that no one else raises their hand to do, it’s probably something you can do well, and for a long time.
Asking students to choose a major — therefore, a career — seems to be the wrong approach. There’s something out of touch about a system that many view as a means (a major) to an end (a job).
This thinking applies well beyond college. Doing what you love might come down to asking the right questions. While not always practical, this might be a good place to start: What would you do for free?
I write about powerful ideas, recession-proof skills, and building a personal brand in my newsletter every week. Join 1,850 subscribers here.
Be First to Comment