Note: I’m about to graduate in like 2 weeks, and one of the most challenging problems I faced was that of finding a career where I thrive. I picked up many life-skills along the journey to finding the ideal career. The following blog is very much a collection of learnings that I gathered, so they might not be applicable to your case, but I’ve made sure to make them as general as possible for all audience to take something with.

The Career Identity

I have a problem with hiring. The thing that I don’t really like about it is the fact that we tend to make our career identity our entire identity, and that too at when we are teenagers and don’t really know how to navigate in the world. We tend to take one of the most important decision(but not THE most important decision) of our lives of what we want to work on when we don’t even know how things work in the first place – as if being a teenager in itself isn’t challenging enough(at least for me, it was). You are dealing with your own issues, and the same time life comes at you at full speed and throws 20 things at you, and you need to somehow make the right decision in all of them? This isn’t ideal, but that’s life.

Making a career(not getting a job, there’s a big difference) is such a convoluted field that any advice you receive is probably of no use in your case – the “gotcha” case of the survivorship bias. There are things you need to figure out on your own, and no amount of advice is going to cut it. I feel with the right approach and being educated about things makes you stand out in a system that doesn’t really care about you.

For me, your career is something from which: you can make money, satisfy your curiosity and provide value to the society. If you are able to find an intersection in all three factions, you are sorted, but let me tell you a hard truth(if you haven’t figured till now), that finding this intersection is REALLY, REALLY, REALLY HARD. One of the first people that come to my mind when I think about people who have find this intersection is Chris Olah – who figured this pretty early, and is someone I look up to for inspiration.

The college experience taught me a lot about life. The “trial period of adulthood” I had in my college prepared me for life in ways I didn’t really imagined. I learned a lot about how to be a good social citizen(I’m a really really really shy person), have good health, how to prioritize my time, how to draw boundaries etcetera. Learning all of these is very complicated, and there’s no way someone could’ve taught me this. I needed to step outside my comfort zone and tackle these on my own. Most importantly, I developed this great habit of having honest one-on-one conversations with myself about things that I want and things I don’t. I carefully weigh in the pros and the cons about things I care deeply about, and usually don’t make a rash decision – and career is certainly one of those important decision. I don’t want to work in specific fields because all of my peers are doing that, but do them because I can find the intersection. Sometimes things work in your favor, and sometimes they don’t, but what you can do is at lea