June 14, 2013
In I Graduated High School. Now What?, I said that it’s important to make the right career choice. The question then becomes... how do I do that?
Firstly, I want to emphasize that it is a process. You never really have complete information as to what you do and don’t like, so you’re constantly working to better understand your interests.
In one sense, knowing whether or not you'd enjoy a given career requires you to have a certain understanding of it. There are too many things to be sufficiently informed about, and because you can’t learn about all of them, your information is always limited.
In another sense, to know whether or not you like something as a career rather than in the abstract, it takes even more information. For example, you may enjoy learning how your brain works, but you might not enjoy life as a neuroscientist writing grants and gathering data from monkeys all day. So... because you never have complete information, you're never really sure what career is best for you.
Let me pause for a second and say that people coming into college who think they know what they want to do should be very careful.
Don't decide too soon. Kids who know early what they want to do seem impressive, as if they got the answer to some math question before the other kids. They have an answer, certainly, but odds are it's wrong.
A friend of mine who is a quite successful doctor complains constantly about her job. When people applying to medical school ask her for advice, she wants to shake them and yell "Don't do it!" (But she never does.) How did she get into this fix? In high school she already wanted to be a doctor. And she is so ambitious and determined that she overcame every obstacle along the way—including, unfortunately, not liking it.
Now she has a life chosen for her by a high-school kid.
-How to Do What You Love by Paul Graham
With the idea of the process in mind, how do you start the process? The way I like to think of it is to start with a breadth-first search, and then proceed with depth-first searches according to your interests.
That means that the first thing you should do is familiarize yourself with as many of your options as possible. I’m referring to a rather superficial understanding, because a deeper understanding of everything would take too long. The purpose of this breadth-first search is just to understand things well enough for you to be able to choose what you want to pursue in more depth. How do you conduct this breadth-first search? I wish I had a better answer to this question, but basically "google around". I’d recommend starting with http://www.shmoop.com/careers/ and reading through everything.
So now I want to get more into depth-first searches. I want to talk about how to proceed after your breadth-first search. First of all, I want to say that it isn’t as cut and dry as I’m making it sound. You kinda do breadth and depth searches at the same time. What I mean to say is that you should focus on breadth first, and then on depth. So really, the way it works is you focus more and more on depth as you learn more and more.
The way to do this is common sense: explore things that interest you in more depth, and stop exploring things you don’t like. How do you explore things in more depth? There are many ways. Depending on what it is, you could read books, read textbooks, do practice exercises, watch videos, shadow people, get some experience doing it yourself... you get the idea.
So... that’s it I guess. My advice is to start with a focus on breadth-first, and get more depth-first oriented as you become more sure of what you do and don’t like. I’ll end with some pieces of concrete advice.