Last night, my husband and I were watching Northwestern campus programming on the Big Ten Network.  We both graduated from NU in the late 90s, which, after seeing the profiles of a few students in the class of 2011, seems like an eternity ago.  We remembered with nostalgia moving into our first dorms, meeting our roommates for the first time, and attending an endless series of campus-sponsored barbecues for new freshmen.

The documentary showed the featured students preparing to register for their first quarter of classes, which unlike us, they would do individually, entirely by computer.  These eighteen year-olds had to make educated decisions about the subjects they would learn about, and while some of them were stressed out by this prospect, others were super-confident that they already knew exactly what they wanted to do with the rest of their lives.

My husband and I, in our early thirties, chuckled at this.  We barely recalled the people we were as college freshmen, but he’d initially been a math major and I thought I might actually have a career in the theater.  My husband eventually went to graduate school and became a professor of clinical psychology, and I am a business advice author and marketing professional.  It was not possible for our paths to diverge more from what we first set out to do with our post-secondary education, and yet we’re perfectly happy and satisfied with the careers we have today.

In nearly every speech that I give to college-age audiences, I emphasize that your career is a journey, not a destination.  There is simply no way to know where you want to be ten or twenty years down the line when you are eighteen or even twenty-two years old.  The best thing you can do for yourself is get as well-rounded an education as possible, learning about as many subjects as you can and keeping your options open.  If you have the chance to experience a new field, even for a day, grab it, and if something catches your eye, investigate it.  Next week begins a New Year – carpe diem!