The ultimate search for the right career
By Yasmeen Sangha, Contributor
This past semester I took a Student Success class and learned that nowadays people have more than one career path throughout their lifetime. The once existing practice of keeping a stable job in a single area and working your way up in a company until retirement isn’t the norm anymore. Do people plan to change careers so often? Do they have multiple passions, designating a percentage of their lives to each one of them? Cross one off the list, then on to the next? I’m not quite sure.
My first dream job was to be a teacher. My grandma was a teacher, and I wanted to be just like her. I still want to
be like her, since my grandmother is a powerful feminist role model in our family and definitely ahead of her time. When it comes to my career, however, I ended up steering away from my initial plan. At the age of nine, I knew I wanted to be an actor, but I kept suppressing this passion for something more practical—although I didn’t really understand what that meant.
In high school, being practical meant pursuing psychology—mostly because my best friends wanted to become
doctors and I hadn’t found something that was my own. I was trying to copy everyone else who seemed to have it together. I discovered for practical reasons, like the fact that my math and science grades are too embarrassing to recount, this was not the right path for me. I guess it wasn’t as practical as I thought. On a whim, I applied for Douglas College’s Performing and Fine Arts certificate program instead. Once I started learning about that which I was genuinely interested in, I began to enjoy school. I have become a completely different person because I decided to stop lying to myself about what I truly wanted.
I like to think most people are like me. We have ideas for what we should be and what we want to be. We might be
afraid and pressured by those around us to make the right choice. People have drifted away from committing to one seemingly stable career: so, is anything really stable? Growing up, we are encouraged to follow our dreams… but why is this message suddenly ripped away from us as adults? The first and most important person who will be directly impacted by your career choices is you, so if you’re choosing to do something you don’t like for the rest of your life, remember that you are the one that will wake up every day to go to that job. You might as well enjoy your career.
