Searching the Innernet

I think I realized why all of my googling for jobs has been largely unsuccessful. What I’m looking for may very well be out there (and it might not) but the point is that, for the time being, I’m looking in the wrong places.

Today I met with Farouk, the Director of the Career Center, to discuss my personal quest to figure out what to do after I graduate. (I don’t really have a name for this search… any ideas? I don’t want to call it a job search because that title seems too rigidly defined). Anyway, I was anticipating the typical routine of sorting through opportunities to apply for, and instead I was greeted with something totally different…

After inquiring about my life story, why I decided to come to Carnegie Mellon (a question I love to answer because there are very distinct reasons why this university appealed to me), and how I came to major in engineering, Farouk posed the following question: “What gets you exited? What do you LOVE to do?”

While this appears to be a very simple question, it was really difficult for me to answer (which made me sort of sad). Interestingly enough, the first thing that popped into my head was yoga. (I actually said out loud that I love yoga). I think this response was natural partially because practicing yoga helps me to feel grounded at a time in my life when I’m so busy doing, rather than being. But more than that, I love the physical and spiritual journey of the practice, and the fact that I can feel so rejuvenated and recharged and refreshed when I roll up my mat at the end of class. In retrospect, I’m not actually sure if this response even answers the question, but it was honest, and it was a reflection of me.

So then I said that I love leading our chapter of Engineers Without Borders, and developing the identity of such a young organization (our chapter was founded during my freshman year). And then from there, I felt myself becoming more and more vague and abstract: I rambled on about how I really enjoy brainstorming and generating ideas, and how I love making connections between people and thoughts and organizations. (As a side note, I also have this fantasy of opening up my own breakfast restaurant called Da me un panqueque in which diners would eat at communal tables, and pick from our garden fruit for their pancakes and vegetables for their eggs.)

So then Farouk asked me: “What things about the world, or society, would you like to change? What angers you?” I think my answer to this question would have been different if we had had this conversation on any other day, but I had just read this NY Times column by Thomas Friedman and so I said that I was angered by the lack of collaboration (and tendency toward competition) in America, and also by the fact that so many people seem to approach problem-solving from a place of limitation and constraint, rather than from a place of possibility. I could describe more precisely what I meant by this, but that isn’t really the point. I could have talked about any number of things: water insecurity and the fact that nearly one out of every seven people on this planet lack reliable access to clean drinking water; the agricultural crisis in America that has made corn an ingredient in almost three-quarters of all products found in the supermarket and has linked poverty with obesity; the fact that our education system is crushing creativity by measuring students against a standard of what we think will produce bright leaders of the future…. You get the idea.

And then, here’s the big one: “How can you channel those things that you love and that excite you, to change something that angers you?” I was so taken-aback by this question – because it articulated perfectly what I’ve subconsciously been aiming for in my job search (for lack of a better name) – that I just sat there and smiled. So Farouk rephrased: “What role do you want to play in the world?” Not what job do you want to have, but what role do you want to play? I confessed that I was stuck in the status quo of traditional job titles, and so he removed those constraints and asked, “If you were a member of a tribe, a million years ago, what role would you play in that society?” I still did not have an answer to this question, but I couldn’t be upset about this because I felt that I had finally come upon the right question to be asking in this process!!

Brad said it really well in the comment he made to my last post, and my friend Anna said it again: we are searching for the WHAT (what we love to do, what excites us) and the WHY (the cause that we are fighting for, the change we want to see in the world). We want to love not only the kind of work we are doing, but also the reason that we are doing it.

I left the meeting with the feeling that I had made huge progress. No, I did not come away with more things to apply for, or even with a sense that I knew what I wanted to do with my life. But I realized that before searching externally, I would need to search internally. Planning the next chapter of life after college is a personal journey – and the best place to start looking is within.