This is where I started at the beginning of the year:
Questioning the Plan: Re-evaluating the world our generation is coming of age within, and how to grow around the uncertainty.
Diana Enriquez tells us the story of how she grew to reject the banking and consulting track, and learned to embrace the uncertainty that allows us to open up and see opportunities everywhere.
As a child, I loved making plans. I enjoyed making lists and keeping journals, both of which I kept on my bookshelf. My prep school, where rule-abiding high-achievers were rewarded, encouraged my habits and promoted careful planning. Life was laid out for us in a 10-year plan, and I was not sure that I could follow it.
My desire to have a plan wasn’t unique: the study of overachievers in our generation, as well as our early obsession with college and the next step, has been multifarious. Alexandra Robbins, author of the highly-lauded non-fiction work, The Overachievers: The Secret Lives of Driven Kids as well as Andrew Ferguson, writer of Crazy U: One Dad’s Crash Course in Getting His Kid into College, explore the challenges of the college admissions process. They look at the point of view of a student and a parent, respectively, with special focus on the desire to enroll in as many projects, classes, and activities as possible in order to impress admissions officers. The real-life characters in Robbins’s book (all students Maryland’s highly competitive Walt Whitman High School) have been on the college prep track since day one of freshman year. Pursuing a plan other than the Whitman-approved ones raises eyebrows in that academic environment. Unfortunately, the same can be said of high schools all over the country: that the reaction to uncertainty has been to bear down on a known path that may or may not be optimal for everyone.
Realizing my major and intended career path didn’t suit me
Like most of my peers, I worked hard in high school. And I loved the experience. But the real excitement of making it through the first step came when I assimilated to campus life. When I first set foot on the Yale University campus, I had many expectations about my major and expected to love my classes. I figured I’d go on to graduate or law school and land a job in the government, as I was always interested in politics and law. I had my plan, but I was quickly met with surprise. I entered my first economics seminar and realized that my classmates and the professor were communicating over AM frequencies, while my brain was in permanent FM mode. It’s hard to get on the same wavelength in that situation.
Besides having a different thought-process than those around me, I struggled to make sense of a subject I assumed I’d love. For the first time in my academic career, I found myself doubting the plan.
My uncharacteristic reaction— to throw out the 10-year plan— worried me. What was I going to do now? High school prepared me for higher education and college was (apparently) supposed to lead to graduate school… but maybe this wasn’t the best thing for me. I was facing questions that I had never really encountered before and desperately trying to whip up a new plan, one that would make me happy and give me the space that I needed to grow. Maybe it meant reshaping my own definitions of success.
What ultimately made me drop the plan
One day, while I was typing an essay, an old friend emailed me about a summer job in Mexico doing sustainable development work in rural communities. My “worry about The Plan” virus was eating away at me, but nevertheless I looked through the description, called a few of the coordinators and realized that this program that had fallen into my lap was exactly what my freshman self had been looking for. I was excited about the fieldwork, the adventure, and the uncertainty about what was ahead. As I booked my flights to Mexico a few weeks later, I knew that this was the beginning of a big change.
My outlook shifted. I began to see opportunities everywhere and took them, especially when it was in a department or field with which I was unfamiliar. I worked with political groups of different leanings. I researched India and signed myself up for a research trip there while my classmates attended informational sessions for Morgan Stanley. This summer, I will be doing research in Colombia on the Drug Wars and Political Campaigns for my senior thesis. None of this would have happened had I not asked myself what would make me happy. Today I walk straighter than I did than when I was all about the Plan.
Embracing the unknown
As I chat with interviewers, their eyes often light up, and I have a feeling they react this way because they recognize I am not afraid of taking risks. I chase opportunities when they present themselves, ask people I don’t even know if I can talk to them about their work, and live the life I want for myself as best I can. I see my friends and classmates struggle with the question, what should I be doing? What does my 10 year plan look like? Is this the next step? And I smile to myself. I find strength in being uncertain and willing to go out there with my eyes open, and it’s my hope that they come to the same realization as well if plan making just isn’t working out for them.
And part of this adventure brought me to one of the ultimate sources of happiness in my year: founding and organizing TEDxYale. I made one of the best friends I will ever have through long hours of working through details, arguing about the merits of different speakers, and learning from him as an equal with a completely different view of the world. In this space, creativity was rewarded. We created a space for people who wanted to talk about their journeys through the uncharted paths in life. I went from nightly phone calls to daily planning meetings with the team to launch a full day conference with 10 alumni speakers, 7 students we trained in the art of public speaking, and a few brilliant professors. I was reminded that life is a twist of fate, and I’ll never know exactly what the next obstacle or opportunity would be. I could only move forward with my eyes open.
I found my center in embracing a future that will be what I make of it. And I learned to love myself, in all of my crazy, quirky interests, because I could shape the person that I wanted to be. I do think I will go on to either law or graduate school, but for now I am going to explore the options I have until I am sold on my decision. I have met my expectations, and now it is time for me to carve out my own space, in this ever-changing job market.
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Diana Enriquez is a junior at Yale University majoring in Political Science and Ethnicity Race and Migration. She is an activist, artist and researcher with a particular interest in migration, the drug wars, and the Latino vote in the 2012 elections. At Yale she is the president of a social-justice oriented student group called MEChA and the founder and co-curator of TEDxYale.
Originally from: http://levolove.com/post/16766472879/questioning-the-plan-re-evaluating-the-world-our#/
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