Chapter One: The Fork in the Road
It is as impossible to withhold education from the receptive mind
as it is impossible to force it upon the unreasoning.”
- Agnes Repplierg
You have made the high school grades you need and are all set to go to college. Congratulations! But let’s not get ahead of ourselves – you may be heading into higher education but that is not your ultimate destination. Despite the giddy mix of exhilaration, self-esteem, and optimism you may be feeling right now, college is not an end in and of itself. It’s a potentially important part of a wider picture with you at its center.
At its best, your college experience can guide you beyond graduation and serve you well for the rest of your life. At its most limited, it can be an expensive distraction from all the things you need to do to find yourself. And find yourself you must, because it’s really all about you and your place in the world.
In many ways, the choices you are faced with bear some resemblance to scenes from the English historical costume drama Downton Abbey. After you have cut away the lace trimmings and bowing and scraping, the first season of Downton is all about a choice. Haughty – and very definitely up-herself – Lady Mary is faced with a choice between holding out for a marriage of love or jumping in with a distant cousin who is the new heir apparent to the family’s stately home. It’s a timeless trope because it’s true; love is always pitted against money, but in this fictional version of the English aristocracy – spoiler alert – she eventually finds herself in love with the money that will save the country pile. So that’s her sorted; what about you?
Shallow gene pools and arcane inheritance laws aside, you need to find a way to emulate the example. You need to turn your burning ambition into a life of promise. You need to uncover the tools that can help you see where your promise lies. The world does not make this easy for you and, in many respects, neither does college but what it does offer is time. Time to explore possibilities. Time to try out subjects and ideas. Time to mold your future to your liking and to your advantage.
Talking of time, at this exact point in time, you stand at a metaphorical fork in the road; at the head of a journey that overflows with potential and one which should set you off not only on a worthwhile, rewarding career but also a life with purpose and meaning. You have decisions to make on what you will study and where you will study it and it seems that each of those decisions are pregnant with potential consequences. It’s a nerve-racking time.
At the same time, I’m sure that teachers, parents, well-meaning aunts and uncles, older siblings and family friends have all pointed out the onerous responsibility of balancing your studies with all the other things that college can offer, but I’m not going to just underline what everyone and their dog is telling you. Because what you really need to know are the techniques and secrets that will significantly enhance the way that college works for you. That starts with the choices of where and what you study, but it also relies on how you learn in the widest possible sense – not only academically on subjects and curricula, but also on the very subject that all successful people know the best; themselves.
College offers you the opportunity to start a journey in the search for your best self, personally and professionally.
The process of understanding anything starts with understanding yourself and the people around you. Raising your field of vision to gain a strategic perspective is vital. You need to strive for improvement and new perspectives, and, whenever possible, base your decisions on facts. Let’s break that all down into some important considerations before you proceed forward.
The Difference Between High School and College
The peak of self-discovery and development happens when, as a young man or woman, you achieve a strong enough sense of self that no external disappointment can entirely undermine. For many college graduates, that begins with the mastery of an advanced education and the development of a knowledge base in one or more disciplines. We all get there through trial and error, hard work, and grit, by failing and learning from our mistakes.
College is the ideal laboratory for self-discovery and building relationships, both of which are just as important for your future as developing subject knowledge and skills.
Go to college with a future mindset and leave your high school past behind. In high school, the range of students is as broad as the community’s and every student is there because they are compelled to attend. Some students have no plans to attend college and only limited interest in academic achievement. Typically, only a fraction of high school students attend college or even aspire to leave their community. You may have grown up in the same town but as you develop, those shared community experiences won’t necessarily propel you through your future life. Your high school classmates’ aspirations vary widely, but those with ambition will likely have to leave the town they grew up in.
By its very nature, you are more likely to meet students in college who share your interests and aspirations. College classes typically represent a skewed population in ambition and achievement. If you were exceptional in high school; you may only be average in college.
Plus, you are all in the same predicament hundreds, if not thousands, of miles from home trying to get yourself acclimatized to a whole new world, away from family and friends. Effectively, you are joining a community with several shared interests. There’s a reason you all chose to attend this college or university. You have ambition and are willing to invest in yourself and subject yourself to the challenges and stress that come with academic achievement.
Shared Cohort Experience
College offers some unique advantages, including the opportunity to be measured by the same shared standards that all college students are measured by. Relative comparison of skills aptitude and intelligence allows you to really get to know your fellow students. You will be given the opportunity to take full measure of your fellow classmates.
College offers you an opportunity to join a community of similar-aged men and women who share interests and aspirations. It brings together people who ordinarily would never have come together on their own. While certain studies or majors do require certain expertise and personality types, so certain classes can become self-selecting. But that offers an opportunity for accidental friendships and fortuitous alliances that could never be replicated in personal life.
You will meet classmates in the dormitory assigned, in the classes assigned, in social settings, and sports activities that you are passionate about. In the process, you will likely become acquainted in some form or another with most of the first-year class. On average, the typical first year class size of a medium sized college is 1,000 students.
College Offers An Opportunity For Self-Discovery
Deciding your major is, quite literally, a major challenge. It is a process that pre-supposes you have undergone some fundamental form of self-discovery and achieved an alignment of aptitude interest and career path. Few college entrants have achieved such self-awareness and that adds another challenge to overcome.
The problem with college is that if you passively submit yourself to the pre-determined college curriculum, it won’t and can’t deliver on your expectations. Rather, you can consider college as a personal retreat that offers you the space to explore. It can offer you an opportunity to develop a clearer vision and better understanding of yourself and your personality and thereby help to eliminate the fog of post-teenage development.
Don’t make the mistake that many less-enlightened students do and see your college opportunity as a simple binary choice between extracurricular activities (often in the form of entertainment) or curricular studies. Such students tend to shortchange themselves by selecting the easiest major, taught by the least demanding professors, and doing the very minimum they can to just “get by” in their classes. This is sometimes referred to as “majoring in the minors.” If you don’t take your education seriously, it shouldn’t be a surprise that it won’t live up to your expectations. Instead, you should keep a perspective on what is important while attending college.
Vast career options
Before the modern era, apprenticeships were the norm; you’d learn hands-on skills and expertise from a mature, seasoned worker in your field. The downside was that back then, your job or career was destined. Your future as a carpenter was a designated outcome of the fact that carpentry was what your family had always done. Today we have more choices, but they come with an inferior form of learning. Most professions, even today’s digitally based jobs, require hands-on training and mentorship.
Today, there are virtually no limits to choosing one’s career path. But choosing a career based on superficial facts will not do. It is easy to misunderstand the attractions of certain careers, simply because so many details of what a job entails are edited out of the description, leaving only the highlights that are easy to admire. People always read the results, but not the labor required to produce them.
It is also easy to be seduced by a romantic or glamorous view of a prospective job, when in fact it entails substantial hardship and tedious labor. You should guard against making choices before weighing the true cost or trade-off that your choices impose. Do not be tempted to pursue occupations that pay well and look good on the surface but require the sacrifice of your ambition.
Finding direction
There are some of us who can identify our passion and corresponding skill sets at an early age. They are the few and fortunate. We have all witnessed classmates that seem to exemplify such talent and skill, secure in their choice of major, and are passionate about their major with blinders to any other discipline.
For those of us who may see ourselves as less talented, we engage less and may even be bored. What boredom really signals is that we are failing to interact with the world. We have lost our way and aren’t being effective. Like other negative emotions, such as anger and sadness, it’s possible that boredom evolved to motivate us. What we're really searching for is to be cognitively engaged. We are demonstrating our need to use our mental resources for something that’s meaningful to us.
Let’s consider a few stories of people who attempted to figure out what was essential for them when they were at the same age as modern-day college entrants. The first is Henry David Thoreau (1817-1862) who was a sort of impromptu philosopher and writer known for his attacks on institutions and his respect for nature and simple living. Thoreau is best known for his book Walden Pond, which documents his experiences living alone on Walden Pond in Massachusetts for over two years.
Thoreau attended Harvard, which he did not particularly like. It turns out he was not particularly likable. One classmate recalled his “look of smug satisfaction,” like a man “preparing to hold his future views with great setness and personal appreciation of their importance.”
After graduation, he held a variety of jobs not displaying any commitment to a career. He worked as a schoolteacher, then helped run a school until its co-director, his older brother John, died of tetanus, which ended Thoreau’s experiments in the practice of teaching. Afterward, he built a cabin on Waldon Pond, living there for several years, but it took nearly 10 years to complete the book, “Walden.”
The real Thoreau was self-obsessed, narcissistic, fanatical about self-control, and adamant that he required nothing beyond himself to understand and thrive in the world. Alternatively, he was an eloquent spokesperson and a prescient voice for the preservation of wild places. But Walden Pond is less a cornerstone work of environmental literature than a sort of cabin isolation fantasy. Thoreau’s nearest neighbor lived only a mile away. Walden Pond was really about rustic life divorced from the reality of living in the woods as well as escaping the entanglements and responsibilities of living among other people.
Thoreau went to Walden to learn to live with what is essential to survival. He wanted to try subsistence living, a condition attractive chiefly to those not obliged to endure it. It attracted Thoreau because he “wanted to live deep and suck out all the marrow of life, to live so sturdily and Spartan-like as to put to rout all that was not life.”
Walden was a sort of referendum for Thoreau’s eschewing of material possessions because he felt possession and materialism got in the way of finding oneself. However, shunning material possessions and failing to maintain a life of wellness and good nutrition meant that he came down with tuberculosis for which – in Thoreau’s time – there was no cure
Throughout his life, Thoreau emphasized the importance of individuality and self-reliance. However, on and off until his death at age forty-four, he worked as a surveyor and in the family pencil factory. He never married. He died in his mother’s home with his only possession, his manuscript “Waldon.”
Very few know Early
The other extreme is the person who seems to know their avocation almost from birth. Such was the case of Albert Einstein. His family operated an electrical generator manufacturing company. One of his first scientific essays dealt with the effect of magnetism on the hypothetical ''ether.'' It was written when he was 16, apparently as part of his first, unsuccessful effort to gain admission to the Federal Institute of Technology in Zurich.
It was the relationship of electricity and magnetism to light waves, as defined a decade earlier by James Clerk Maxwell, that helped put Einstein on the road toward his first relativity theory. As Einstein wrote later, Maxwell's theory was ''the most fascinating subject at the time that I was a student.'' But as a former professor of physics at Boston University and Einstein scholar, Dr. John Stachel pointed out recently, the Einstein electrical manufacturing enterprise failed, first in Munich and then in Italy, where the Einstein family moved after a business failure. Their son, Albert, was excelling in the Luitpold Gymnasium in Munich school, but he hated it there and he soon followed the family to Italy.
The scope of the electrical manufacturing activity of Einstein’s family, including his father Hermann and his more scientifically minded Uncle Jakob, is more significant than first understood. It now appears that the Einstein enterprise was internationally recognized and considerably more innovative than previously suspected. Technical journals in Britain, France, Italy, and Germany reveal that one of its devices, an electric meter, was patented in the United States and that the Einstein company built the central power station for a Munich suburb.
Another testament to Einstein’s intelligence comes from Dr. Max Talmey, who as a medical student in Munich, knew Einstein when he was ten and a half years old. His ''exceptional intelligence,'' Talmey wrote later in a book, enabled him to discuss with a college graduate ''subjects far beyond the comprehension'' of so young a child. Talmey gave him two books on physics, one of which was entitled ''Force and Matter,'' as though anticipating Einstein's famous definition of the relationship between mass and energy.
Figuring it out Serendipitously
Albert Einstein represents a very small minority of people who seem to know their direction in life when they are very young; most of us need to learn that as we go, and often find our way by trial and error.
Some people seem to discover what is essential for them serendipitously, just by happening to come across something that clicks into place for them. That’s how Carl Jung figured out what he wanted to study and the career he most wanted to pursue.
Carl Jung, the noted turn-of-the-century Swiss psychiatrist, contributed hugely to mankind’s knowledge of the human condition. Looking at the arc of Carl Jung’s life you might assume that he had an easy life, and intuitively knew at an early age his passion for psychiatry.
But, in truth, Jung had a volatile, uncertain childhood. His mother suffered from psychological problems, spending some time in institutions, while his father was barely able to eke out a living so the family lived in hardship. Carl Jung was solitary and an introverted child. His mother’s psychological problem caused the young Jung considerable consternation. During Jung’s early childhood, he did not always have the best of relationships with his parents. He considered his mother to be a good mother, but he felt that her true personality was always hidden from him.
As Jung grew older, his interests in a large variety of sciences, and the history of religion made the choice of a career quite difficult. However, he finally decided on medicine, following the example of his grandfather, a noted physician. Carl Jung studied at the University of Basel (1895–1900) and received his medical degree from the University of Zurich in 1902.
All during medical school, he was uncertain which specialty he should enter. By serendipity, while studying for his final exam, he came across a textbook on psychiatry. As he thumbed through the pages, he came upon the words, “maladjusted personalities.” According to interviews he gave, it was at that very instant he knew that he would be majoring in psychiatry. Everything apparently just clicked in place for him.
He focused his studies and ultimate practice on psychiatry, even at the expense of ignoring an invitation from one of his professors to join him to practice medicine at a leading Zurich medical center. This was a radical departure for someone raised in a Swiss-German community that emphasized the legitimacy of perfectionism and frowned upon radical views and thinking and abhorred any kind of flaws in judgment or behavior.
Furthermore, as a pre-med student, his professors were very critical of his writing skills, and were concerned about his ability to complete his dissertation. Nonetheless, he prevailed and graduated. Not long after practicing medicine, Jung published his first book, “Studies in Word Association” which was ultimately reviewed by Dr. Sigmund Freud.
Jung went on to be a fearless writer and publisher of many books. His largely intuitive findings about human psychology and behavior have had a profound impact, not just on psychology, but in the business world and society at large.
Deciding on your major
Choosing a major is one of the most important milestones in your college experience, and it’s a decision that will influence your career trajectory — for better or worse. Whatever you choose to do for a living will most probably govern 70% of your life ahead. Thus, it helps if your career choice is in sync fundamentally with who you are! It will likely have a substantial impact on job satisfaction when your occupation matches your personality type.
In the first two years of college, all students must take a certain number of required courses before having to make a commitment to a major. This gives a student time to discover themselves and their true personality traits. Why not use that time to aid the student in self-understanding and self-discovery? But most colleges don’t provide any assistance at all. You’re on your own. Plus, the process of self-discovery isn’t linear and can take an unknown amount of time. It’s a complex process laced with uncertainty. Ideally, a school of higher learning should assist students in aligning their aptitude and interest with their ideal career path. Rather than doing so, most colleges emphasize graduating on time.
There’s really nothing more critical to your education than learning who you really are; so, you must take responsibility for understanding who you are and must take this task upon yourself, not just in college but as you go forward in life. As humans, we constantly grow and evolve. Staying in-touch with who you are at your very core can be difficult in such a fast-paced world. When you lose touch with who you are, you risk losing perspective. Taking time for self-discovery can help you get back in touch, allowing you to keep focused on what’s most important in life.
Knowing yourself gives you the kind of self-confidence that makes you less vulnerable to the criticism of others. It allows you to maintain perspective, even when being criticized. It may help you stand up for yourself when under attack and help you better manage disputes by acting rationally and composed.
Self-knowledge 101
The personality type or values that you stand for will always govern what you enjoy doing. These traits or values must be considered in the evaluation process to determine a suitable career. A good match means you are more likely to be successful and will enjoy going to work.
Personality quizzes can be a great way to remind yourself of your strengths, which can boost confidence and help to generate pride. Reading through your personality test results can help to marshal the strengths you possess. After all, they are a summary of everything that makes you unique, while highlighting your innate talents.
Personality tests can also help you make better career choices. Career-focused assessments can help you discover what type of company culture is the best fit for your personality type, or it can help you discover career strengths and weaknesses. Armed with this type of information, you can learn how to thrive in your career and find a job that suits you.
Interestingly, it was Carl Jung’s personality theory that contributed significantly to one of the widely used personality tests, the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator. From years of psychoanalysis of patients, Jung was able to identify certain personality trait patterns. The first over-arching category he defined was extroverts and introverts. In 1921, Jung published the book Psychological Types, where he laid out his theory of personality. He believed that each person has a psychological type. He wrote “What appears to be random behavior is actually the result of differences in the way people prefer to use their mental capacities.”
Some people, he observed, mainly take in information, which he called perceiving, while others mainly organize it and draw conclusions, which he called judging. He also believed that there are four psychological functions. Thinking asks the question “What does it mean?” This involves making judgments and decisions. Feeling asks the question “What value does this have?” Feeling, for instance, maybe judging right versus wrong. Sensation asks “What exactly am I perceiving? This involves how we perceive the world and gather information using our different senses. Intuition asks, “What might happen, what is possible?” This refers to how perception relates to things like goals and past experiences.
Inspired by Jung’s work, Isabel Myers and her mother Katharine Cook Briggs created the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator. They developed the personality measure in the 1940s, which consists of 16 personality types.
I recently reconnected with an old college classmate. After many phone calls exchanging stories, and sharing experiences and accomplishments about the intervening decades, I asked him if he had ever taken a personality test. He didn’t know what it was. I was curious because he had accomplished something quite difficult. He had gone from graduating at the top of his class as a chemistry major to ultimately becoming a journalist and newsletter editor. Later, I discovered that he had attended college on a full scholarship and had qualified as a Merit Scholar.
After graduation, he worked two years as a research chemist at Xerox, a sort of graduating chemist’s dream job. But he didn’t feel fulfilled; he became restless and left. He spent several years hitchhiking taking odd jobs, including a job as zoo handler in Florida and a grounds person at a gated community from which he got fired. He spent several years wandering in the wilderness so to speak. He had gone on this migration trying to discover himself and his interests.
Somehow, he migrated to journalism with stints as a freelance reporter and columnist, which would ultimately become his chosen career. What’s amazing is that he had successfully transitioned from being a quantitative scientist to becoming a writer, a man of letters, and a qualitative scrivener.
I can tell you from experience that science majors are typically not known for their writing ability. They tend to be highly quantitative people who can visualize and dissect scientific theories and theorize their application. As a rule, quantitative people are very different from qualitative people. They tend to be more methodical, introverted and process oriented. They are also not known for their people skills. Scientific research requires considerable discipline, rigorous methodology, and consistency. I always assumed that he had those personality traits.
Effectively, he had to overcome substantial barriers in his migration, out-of-phase skill sets, left brain/right brain abilities, and extravert versus introvert personality traits, while having to develop highly advanced writing and communication skills. Crossing such perceived barriers without the aid and confidence offered up by clinical testing of aptitude is amazing.
Again, a school of higher learning should assist students in aligning their aptitude and interest with their ideal career path. If colleges took more of an interest in aligning student’s aptitude with their career path, it would more likely result in a student making a more thoughtful selection of their major. And it would improve their overall satisfaction in their college experience. Most colleges, however, make no effort to assist their student and so almost 50% of graduating students regret their choice of major.
Hacking the college system
I advise students to hack the college system’s psychological support services to gain an understanding of themselves. Most colleges have guidance counselors and psychologists on staff. Most of these services are offered but on a passive basis. If you want to make use of this service, you must be proactive and engage staff to aid in your effort of self-discovery. To help you navigate potential aiders in your journey through college, I have listed a few here.
Academic Advisors
Most college students don’t have their futures planned out from start to finish and that’s okay – that’s why you’re assigned an academic advisor. These individuals are trained to help you map out your college career and help guide you through the process of achieving your goals. Sure, you can probably do it all on your own, but why would you want to if you don’t have to? Get help from someone who knows how to get you from point A to point B, effectively and efficiently.
Career Centers
Creating your first resume and/or cover letter can be daunting but, with the proper help and guidance, you can ensure yours are in tip-top shape. When creating these job or internship materials, work with your campus career center. As well as helping you prepare the materials you need for your job or internship search, they can help you locate great opportunities too!
Counseling
Most colleges are aware that students get overwhelmed at times. That’s why many offer free counseling sessions for students – so you can deal with feeling over-stressed, depressed or anxious. Your school wants you to remain healthy, both mentally and physically, so take advantage of this resource as needed.
Unless you take the initiative towards self-discovery, you are likely to get battered by life. However, identifying your innate traits and understanding their impact on behavior will allow you to lead a better life with greater opportunities for happiness.
In the next chapter, we will examine another important way to start to figure out who you are, what you would enjoy studying, and how to position yourself to succeed in college and beyond. Instead of narrowing your focus, it involves broadening your view, and sampling as wide a range of subjects as possible.
