I remember being in school and it never failed, I would get the question, “What are you going to do when you finish?” My response was, “I will get a job doing…”. And I have; more jobs than I can count. My first job was at a photography studio in a popular department store and since then, I have worked in offices, banks, hospitals, bars, and a lumberyard, just to name a few. I have even owned my own business, washing and detailing cars to put myself through my Master’s degree. (As first-generation, I did not know that graduate assistantships existed). These were all jobs.
What is a job? According to Merriam-Webster, a job is “a regular remunerative position”, meaning a position in which you are being paid. Jobs are plentiful. You can find a job at any point in your adult life, whether or not you want to do that job is up to you. What if we reframe the answer to the question above? What if I had responded, “I would like a career doing…”. It feels different.
A career is defined as, “a profession for which one trains and which is undertaken as a permanent calling” or “a field for or pursuit of consecutive progressive achievement especially in public, professional, or business life”. You are training for a “permanent calling” and “progressive achievement”. You are doing this through schooling and a subsequent series of jobs. Each job is a stepping stone along your career trajectory.
So, how do we know what career is right for us? This starts with your passion, personality, and what you want out of life personally and professionally. When thinking about a career, try not to focus on what the job will be. Instead of, “I want a career as a professor”, consider, “I love challenges and problem solving. I don’t want every day to be the same. I want my work to serve the greater good of society. I want the freedom to come and go at my job and work when I want because I want to have a large family. I would like to be able to travel at least once per year.” This broad understanding of what you want your life to be, will help you find the right job that will contribute to your overall happiness and allow for work-life balance. Find the series of jobs that will lead you there. Reframing how you view jobs and careers will better prepare you in your job search and in interviews. You will know what questions to ask about expectations for work, culture regarding taking vacation, and day-to-day freedom & responsibilities.
Even if you do want to be a professor, think about what you want your life to be like. You may say, isn’t every job as a professor the same? No. No it is not. This all depends on the expectations of your institution—mainly with regards to how much of your salary are you expected to cover with external grants. Do you strive to lead a field of research and be well-known for your work? Do you strive to have a large laboratory with several funded grants? Do you strive to be a good teacher and/or mentor a few students in a small laboratory? Talk to your current mentors about how each of these situations may impact your personal life. Being a professor is great, you choose when to work. Being a professor may not be so great for you, you could end up working all the time.
To get you started about what you may want out of life, here are a few questions you can ask yourself:
Do you want a family?
If yes, what does this look like? Who takes care of the children (daycare, nanny, one partner stays at home, family member)?
How much flexibility will you need to participate in your child’s activities (sports, dance, and so forth)?
Will you have other family members you will need to care for?
Where do you want to live?
How often do you want to travel?
What sort of salary will you need to earn to support yourself, where you’d like to live, and potentially a family?
Do you like consistency from day-to-day in your work (meaning how much do you like doing similar tasks each day or do you want every day to be different)?
How much responsibility do you want to have at work? Do you want to supervise others? If so, how large of a team?
Do you want to teach and mentor?
Do you want to own your own business or have a position where you have nearly all control over what you do daily?
What is important to you?
These questions should allow you to make a few statements about what you’d like your life to be like in 5, 10, 25 years from now. Plan your career trajectory toward this ideal. I should add that most of us won’t end up in this perfect utopia and likely, what we want will change over time. Therefore, it is important to evaluate these questions on a fairly regular basis and adjust your trajectory accordingly.
When you start your job search, don’t try to “get a job”. Try to think out your path and then seek out the jobs that will put you on that trajectory. This opens the search broadly and provides you with opportunities you may not have realized existed. And many times, what we think will be our career, ends up being something different. Life has a funny way of doing that.
About the author:
Jenna is currently faculty in Health & Kinesiology at Texas A&M University. Before starting her PhD (a bit later in life), she had worked for large and small companies and the United States federal government.