Looking ahead

Is it just me or does anyone else get those middle of the night panic thoughts of “I have no idea what I want to do with my life”?! I mean obviously I don’t get them all the time, most nights I fall asleep instantly after watching I’m a celeb without any deep life concerns. I find I tend to get these thoughts towards this time of year, I guess because we’re approaching a new year and I feel I’m no closer to realising what I want to do with the rest of my life. As a kid I was so dead set on being a vet, then that changed to wanting to be a magazine editor and now I really don’t know. Ironically the more jobs and careers I become aware of, the less inkling I have of which would be best suited to me.

I did one of those career tests the other day, not expecting great things, yet my best matched career came up as exhibition designer. This is something I’d never even considered despite having visited many art, fashion and photography exhibitions in my time and loving gallery spaces in general. I guess the next step is to do some more research into this field; do I have to have design background? do I need to have done a special degree?! how do I go about getting gallery experience?

Whilst I am feeling relatively lost in terms of my future prospects, I have been recommended the careers service in uni by a couple of my friends who have been themselves. One of my friends went in pretty clueless as to what she wanted to do after uni and emerged twenty minutes later with a list of possible careers that would be really suited to her based on her interests and passions. I feel like it would benefit me to go not necessarily to be told my ideal career there and then, but to clear things up in my head a bit, to give some guidance as to what the next step is to help me figure out what I want to do and how to go about getting there.

Maybe it’s late night thoughts playing with my mind but I find it interesting how, for me at least, as we get older things become less black and white and less clear cut; things we may have been certain about as a kid no longer seem so certain. I’m not saying this is a bad thing at all though, in fact on the contrary, it opens our eyes to so many more opportunities we weren’t even aware of as kids; we could be doing jobs and having careers that don’t even exist yet. That’s both a scary yet really exciting concept. I’ve still got a little time to mull things over though as I’ve just submitted my year abroad choice form for the USA meaning I’ve got another two years to figure out where exactly I’m going post uni…