Are you an excellent sheep?
Examining the different paths that lie in front of us
The other day, I received a LinkedIn connection request from a dude at Rice University. For the sake of his privacy, let’s call him Lebron James.
Lebron and I DMed back and forth on LinkedIn for a bit, and had a lovely call yesterday. We discussed my many LinkedIn posts, my consulting recruiting experiences, and his undergrad journey at Rice.
In particular, he was wondering whether he should stay in the few business classes he enrolled in this quarter, or drop them and do something else. He’d already finished up his major, and was looking to fill up his time before he graduates this fall semester.
I asked him why he’s taking those business classes, and it turns out, he figured he might as well get a third major in business because he wasn’t sure what to do with his extra time. Plus, “it’d look good on his resume”.
This made me quite concerned, and we proceeded to chat for another 15 minutes about this particular predicament of his. I was quite worried that he was filling his time for no reason, and that he’d regret not doing something more meaningful during his last year of undergrad.
I ended up recommending that he explore all the different buildings at Rice instead, and we had a super exciting and fun chat about my similar exploration at UCLA. (much more on this in a future post, don’t worry!)
And so here we are now, after a day of pondering Lebron’s situation. I wanted to explore my idea of following default paths here, and shared some thoughts I had about it recently.
Let’s do this darn thing!
Throughout most of my schooling experience, I had one main goal: go to college. And ideally, go to a good one.
And while this process of getting into a top college was quite hard, at the end of the day, it was quite simple. I needed to get good grades, play some sports, volunteer, become an Eagle Scout, write some sappy essays, and I was all set.
These steps were very hard to accomplish, but the path itself was very clear.
And somewhere along the way, I realized that I actually didn’t have any clue about what I wanted to do with my life. I took a few law classes in high school and really enjoyed my economics classes, so I decided to apply for business and economics programs at a few different universities. I told myself that “I’ll figure it out in college”, and called it a day.
And after many conversations with many different people, I’ve realized that I’m definitely not alone in this thinking.
When we don’t understand what we actually want to do in our lives, we settle for the default societal path. We figure we’ll decide what to do later, and hope for the best. So we do all of these things we knew we should do: get the good grades, play the sports, do the volunteering, write the essays, etc.
And then something crazy happens — we get into these great schools we’ve worked so hard for, and we suddenly have no idea what to do. All of the clear structure we’ve had in our lives (get into a good college) is gone, and we have to figure out ourselves what to do.
From personal experience and observation, I’ve found that when this happens, a few curious things occur.
First, you have an existential crisis, and you kinda wonder how in the world you’ll move forward. This is the classic fresh-in-college experience, and most of the people I’ve spoken to about this have felt this crisis feeling many times.
And crucially after that, two main things can happen:
You take the time to figure out what you want to do in your life. You explore different things, try out the different options, and start to narrow down on what you actually find fulfilling. This sounds easy, but in reality is actually quite hard and uncomfortable.
You choose another default path to go down to delay this self-exploration. You still don’t know what you want to do with your life, but you again convince yourself that “you’ll figure it out later”.
And it’s crazy how many times I’ve seen this latter option play out so many times at UCLA. In my particular niche at UCLA (the business world), this ends up manifesting itself by a ton of students pursuing investment banking and consulting without knowing what these fields actually are and why they actually want to pursue them. (this is especially true of some pre-med and pre-law peers I’ve met)
The logic used to justify these careers is that they give you a lot of optionality after working them, they pay well, and they’re very prestigious. The word “exit opportunities” is thrown around, and students convince themselves that once they’re in those roles, they’ll figure out what they want to do with their lives.
This sounds exactly like college admissions. But instead of following the steps to get into a great college, students are now following the steps to get into a great career. And this is pretty much exactly what happened to me.
I’m often asked why I joined The Bruin Group (TBG), expecting some grand response about how it aligned with my professional goals and all that. The reality is that all of my peers were applying to these business clubs, I didn’t want to be left behind, and so I applied to all of them, too.
TBG was the only club I got into, and it just so happened to be a consulting club.
And when everyone in TBG started recruiting for consulting internships and talking about how great they were, it was only natural that I did the same thing, too. It became very hard to rationalize doing something different than everyone around me. If everyone was recruiting for consulting and I didn’t too, wasn’t I going to be left behind?
I ended up getting a top offer, and I felt super duper proud of myself. But curiously, this feeling of pride only lasted a few days. After that, I found myself simply feeling relieved that I was done with internship recruiting.
At the end of the day, there’s nothing wrong with the default path, or clear career paths in general. If they didn’t exist, society would struggle as its young people had to each figure out, from complete scratch, what to do with themselves.
The important thing is to intentionally choose where you’re going. From the people I’ve met and talked to over the years, the happiest and most fulfilled ones were those who consciously chose to do what they were doing. They felt that they decided their own future.
Those who slid into their lives, not really thinking intentionally about what they wanted to do, ended up seeming quite unhappy. They seemed to be discontent with their careers and ultimately, their lives. I’ve been there before myself, and felt this lack of satisfaction in life. The scariest thing about being there was not that I disliked where I was, but I began to feel indifferent about it. I began to feel, at times, like a spectator in my own life. And let me tell you, that’s not a good place to be.
I encourage you to really consider what you’re doing with your time. We only get to live once, and it’s crucial that we make the most of it. I’ve spent the last few months doing a lot more exploration, and I’ve grown and learned so much during this time. And I’m more excited for the future than ever before.
Are you intentionally doing what you’re doing now, or are you just following what those around you are doing? Are you blindly walking through your own life, not knowing what you’re doing? Are you spending all of your effort climbing up a mountain, without even stopping to see if that’s where you want to go?
Are you an excellent sheep?
Just know that it’s never too late to open your eyes and make your own path and that the sooner you start, the better. You don’t want to be the person who looks back on their life with regret, trust me.
Good luck!
Best,
Dennis :)
Dennis’s Picks:
I was exploring Bunche Hall with my friend Ariv last week, and found this hilarious comic on one of the professor’s office door:
Student: Can I borrow a pencil?
Teacher: I don't know. Can you?
Student: Yes. I might add that colloquial irregularities occur frequently in any language. Since you and the rest of our present company understood perfectly my intended meaning, being particular about the distinctions between "can" and "may" is purely pedantic and arguably pretentious.
Teacher: True, colloquialism and the judicious interpretation of context help us communicate with nuance, range, and efficiency. And yet, as your teacher, my job is to teach you to think about language with care and rigor. Understanding the shades of difference between one word and another, and to think carefully about what you want to say, will give you greater power and versatility in your speech and writing.
Student: Point taken. May I have a pencil?
Teacher: No, you may not. We do not have pencils since the state cut funding for education again this year.
great read