I am scared.
Imagine waking up when you’re 50. You see a delicate sunbeam hit your sheets, and you smile for a second. But, your slight grin erodes from your face, and your eyebrows furl as you slowly realize that you made the wrong choice.
Your life of work has been a total waste of your time. Twenty-five plus years, flushed down the toilet, all because you chose your career path when you were 18 years old. Maybe you chose it because you thought you loved it or because it had a high salary. Or perhaps you were just shooting from the hip.
If this doesn’t keep you up at night, you might want to lower your dose of Ambien.
Of course, far too many people live in fear of starvation, physical harm or social duress. But still, this existential ennui is a valid emotion, a product of a lack of fulfilling the need for self actualization. Not living up to one’s authenticity, one’s true self, can be terrifying. But it should not be paralyzing.
That’s why we invented education: the dialogue between people that creates meaning. Its point is not to get you a job, but to find your vocation. Some people refer to this as your calling/your passion/your talents.
Kinky Friedman, famed singer, has a particularly pithy quote to describe this sentiment: “Find what you like, and let it kill you.” Although insightful, I think there’s more to the search than that. A professor and good friend of mine drew an analogy to captain Ahab hunting down Moby Dick. People hate on his relentless pursuit for the sake of revenge. But hey, at least he cared about something.
Your white whale is your unending quest for meaning, for discovery, for social improvement, for whatever. The point isn’t to catch it, but to recognize it and then let it consume you.
A privileged, 20-year-old man-child shelling out pretentious advice on the meaning of life is the cliché of clichés. You can reject it, but at least let me tell you how I found my white whale: conferences.
Conferences, if you haven’t had the pleasure of attending, are when a bunch of grown-ups in a given field get together at a hotel or a convention center, make presentations, hold workshops, host panel discussions, etc. Some students use them to schmooze up and expand their network, get free stuff or get some clout in the academic world. But these are all trivial compared to the value of a glimpse into the future that conferences provide.
Assuming your field won’t change in nature during the next couple of years (sorry journalism), the culture will remain relatively constant. The people you meet at conferences are a microcosm of your potential coworkers. You hear their jokes, see how they dress and watch their rapport. This gives you the opportunity to see just exactly what you’re getting into.
Besides the media of learning, the content of what’s presented is of great importance. What’s discussed is the frontier of a field. The questions being asked and the solutions being proposed may be your potential projects. If they enthrall you or you see the opportunity in an alternate route, the field might be right for you; however, if you are bored to tears, some deep thinking might be in order.
Sadly though, conferences can be awfully expensive to attend. I just went to an Institute of Nuclear Materials Management conference, which costs just shy of $1,000 for non-member registration; that figure doesn’t even include hotel and transportation costs. Thankfully though, there are many opportunities out there to lower a staggering number such as volunteering, applying for a grant or presenting a paper.
