The life of students, whether pursuing undergraduate or graduate degree, is hectic. We need to pursue academics seriously to maintain high grades, develop our profile for jobs and internships and balance all this along with other changes that come during teenage and adolescence. All this drains the energy of a young individual a great deal.
But one question, which I regard as an essential question for living a satisfying life, needs to be answered. The question is: “Am I doing what I am passionate about, or am I just going with the flow?”
Each one of us needs to find an answer to this question, and it is essential to do this as early as possible in life, for the answer to this question can make one’s life beautiful, and the lack of an answer invariably leads to frustration.
The earlier one realizes their passion, the better. If the education a student gets aligns with their passion, it is the best. However, for most of my peers, this is not the case. Exploring an activity and realizing it as one’s passion takes time. If one does it in the formative years of their life, it can take them a long way. And the best time to start, if your degree does not align with your passion, is towards the end of the degree, as that is a transition phase and one has ample free time for any exploration.
But why this necessity to explore passion as soon as possible? The answer is simple: We are not immortal, and the earlier in life we discover our passion, the more is the time we can spend nurturing our passion and deriving creative satisfaction from it.
I have often thought about a time when I have a well-paying job and am living a comfortable life. But is that all I want? Is paying the bills on time and saving for future the only thing that would bring me satisfaction? According to the Harvard Business Review, the actual correlation between remuneration earned and happiness is very weak. Hence, even earning money, for most people, is not the source of happiness or satisfaction, and happiness affects overall health of a person. Hence, pursuing a passion has a positive effect on the health of people.
Writing has been my passion for a long time, and I have been fortunate to find the opportunity to write for Technician, even while pursuing my graduate degree. However, not everyone is as fortunate. If a student pursuing engineering wants to learn music, or a student pursuing management wants to develop photography skills, they can do so only to a limited extent. However, towards the end of degree, when a student has more time at their hands, they can afford to work on their passion(s) and explore them to build a strong foundation.
An ideal life would be where one’s profession aligns with their passion. I have seen and read about individuals who did not explore and nurture their passions getting frustrated in their profession later in their lives. They try a lot of things, which are ways to deal with their frustration of not being able to do what they were initially passionate about. Although age does not limit passion, it becomes increasingly difficult to pursue and/or nurture passion as one grows older, primarily because of lack of flexibility to change and the increase in responsibilities.
Every young individual should spend some time trying to explore/understand their passion and nurture it in the long run. Given the intense education programs they we are enrolled into, unless our education offers us an opportunity to learn more about our passion, it is difficult to balance the two. However, this changes towards the end of our degree when we can afford substantially more time for our passion. Pursuit of passion is essential to living a satisfying life: the end of a degree is the time one must start identifying what they are passionate about, if they have not already done so.
