The 30 Day Challenge – do something small every day to make the world a better place. Great, I thought, that sounds like something I would love to do. And then I remembered that sinister mountain of essays I seem to be tackling this term, and my continual struggle to fit in eating and sleeping, let alone grappling with serious social issues. Although some finalists on the challenge are competently managing this juggling (I take my hat off to Judith!), I decided to do something arguably extremely self-centred with my Challenge: to figure out what I specifically want from life.
The Challenge was set at an inspiring careers workshop, run by Cambridge Hub, where careers advisor Neil Prem offered us an alternative way of looking at our futures: don’t focus first on the skills you have picked up, but look back and work out what you have loved doing, what you have disliked doing, and which world issues you feel most passionate about. (You might be great at ironing, but you don’t necessarily want to spend the next fifty years in the laundry!) From here, it should be a series of simple steps to figuring out what kind of career might suit you best, focussing first on skills and then on sector. Thus, armed with this advice, I decided simply to keep a diary, noting down each day one of these things that I have discovered about myself. I admit, I’m not feeding the homeless, or fundraising thousands for orphans, but I’m hopefully making steps towards a future in which I might be able to do such things for a living. It’s an adventure I would recommend to anyone struggling to identify what it is they would be happy to do every day, while also feeling like they are doing something worthwhile with their time.
At first, it was hard to note something down each day: not surprisingly, finding anything which seemed particularly thrilling in a library-bound day of essay-writing wasn’t easy. But little things can be telling: I like planning and writing, I like meeting deadlines, scheduling my week, ticking boxes and managing other people. I’ll be the first to admit this is all pretty mundane, but they’re things which are easy to forget, and what I’m perhaps finding most telling is what isn’t on the list.
The next step was to look through my list and act on those things. I pieced ideas together like parts of a puzzle and worked out that I would love write in my career, or help manage events or fundraisers, building these things into work in the charity sector, perhaps specifically within education. As a result of this, I’ve done some research and sent out some emails regarding summer work doing one or more of these things, but more exciting than this, I’ve got an interview to be a summer school tutor at Action Tutoring, and I’ve written my first official blog post for Development in Action. I know these are tiny steps, but they are steps that I wouldn’t have made had I not taken two minutes each day to identify my interests, just in two weeks of busy term-time!
For anyone who feels frustrated with their career aspirations, knowing they want to do something worthwhile but unsure where to turn when bombarded with information, options and talks, or for anyone whose friends all seem to be completely sure where they are headed, I’d recommend this, if nothing else, as a 30 Day Challenge. I already feel much happier with the path I’m now following, having dropped certain career options, begun to consider new possibilities, and having acted on those ideas. Who knows what insights the next fifteen days will bring, for me, or perhaps for you!
–Connie Fisher–
© Sophie Taylor
Cambridge Hub 