Academic Advising

I'm tired of trying to predict what the world wants of me, what it will be like a year (or two or three, if I hide in grad school) from now when I'm forced to join it.  How am I supposed to know?  Everybody has an opinion on how best to prepare for it.

There are doom and gloom advisers.  It's easy to want to trust them, with their diplomas declaring "I passed" neatly command hooked to the walls of their offices, supposed testaments to their successes.  All the textbooks that now gather dust on their office shelves because they no longer read them.  Maybe the diplomas really say "I failed."  Nobody starts out with ambitions to be an adviser anyway.  That means they failed first at something else. Maybe they failed at pursuing the goal you're asking them about; maybe they have a reason to tell you an English major will make you miserable because an English major made them miserable.  But you're not them and they can't know you from a collection of scores scribbled in pencil on an academic worksheet, a conglomeration of classes that adds up to practically nothing but a lot of money and time. 

Or maybe they failed because the conditions really are terrible, they've been through things you're too young and idealistic to know about, and you should listen to them because they're right.  Maybe they really do want to help you; maybe you really do need their rough love, their reality check.

There's the other students.  The hakuna matatars, the it-will-all-work-out-so-let's-take-a-shot-ers.  They convince you for a moment that maybe you can't really plan for the unknowable future, and things will just fall into place if you keep trucking along.  Maybe you are a little too high strung. You'll have a diploma. It'll be okay.  Spend a semester in Buenos Aires or the Carribean. Live life. But what if these college hippies are just lifetime loafers waiting to become the homeless people on Franklin Street, begging for change and cigarettes.  When their looks and vodka runs out, what will they have?

There's the friends and family, brimming with over-confidence in you.  You are brilliant and driven and gorgeous and nothing can stop you.  They believe in your pixelated skype smile more than you do.  Every rejection letter is their loss, every bad test grade comes from a bad professor, you weren't tugging on any of the doors that slam shut.  They mistake giving up dreams for being lazy or insecure.  They live forty years behind you, not really understanding the ticking in your brain or the circumstances of your desperation.

So who is right?  Who should you believe? Amid all of it, you must figure out where your voice is, what your heart wants, what the world wants.  How do you put food on the table without sacrificing everything you love?  This might be the key question to the universe. It is not about where we came from or if there's a god.  It's more about "how do I still get to read Dickens without becoming one of his starving characters?"

I love too many things and not enough things.  I'm decent at a few things but not good enough at any of them.  I can't accept that I'm useless to the world, but I can't find a good use for myself.  Is the peak of my productivity checking out DVDs to undergrads?  Surely not.

I resist believing in fate or god or anything that would make these decisions for me.  I relish in free will and the power of humanity to shape itself.  But right now, I just want somebody to tell me what to do.  But I've only got me.