Adolescents commonly face great anxiety when asked what they would like to be when they grow up, and that anxiety consequently drives them to avoid this line of thinking. It’s nice to know I wasn’t alone in that regard, but the habit of career avoidance has followed me into my 20’s. If I was asked “what do you want to be when you grow up” when I was a kid, I wouldn’t have an answer; you might as well ask me to pull out my crystal ball and gaze into the future. Well, that uncertain and uncomfortable future seems to be right around the corner, and I must admit that I am only moderately prepared. I want to go into environmental health and safety and so I at least have an answer to the question, but indecision and hesitancy still hang over me and hijack my thought processes on the matter.

I don’t want to sound like I’m bragging, but I was a great student before coming to Stony Brook: lazy and unmotivated, sure, but I found within me a certain fortitude that allowed me to efficiently absorb my studies and to eventually find deeper meaning within them. I could never draw from that fortitude to think seriously about career decisions, or maybe I never really tried because of the aforementioned laziness. Because I wouldn’t engage in career thought, my education became more insular, and everyday I learned was for learning’s sake instead of pointing toward an occupational goal. In turn, my career aspirations were insulated from my skills and experiences, existing in a private world of fantasy. I wanted to be famous; I wanted to be important; on days I didn’t like myself, I wanted my career to be as far from my personality as it could go. Career decision making became an unnavigable maze, arbitrarily built to perpetuate the present. By the time I graduated high school, I had as much career direction as when I was a kindergartner; everything was open to me, but I felt incapable of going anywhere.

Things only got worse when I got to Stony Brook. As an institution respected for the sciences, I wanted to go into science; the field I was best at was biology, so a biology major I would be. One thing I knew at this point was that I didn’t want to go the clinical route my mother did, because it appeared too competitive in academics and too stressful in occupations. The area that struck me as both interesting and important where I could use my biology degree was with the environment; so I assigned myself as an “environmental engingeer” as my career choice, despite not knowing anything about the job. From the get-go — even though I entered Stony Brook undeclared — I was pigeonholing myself with a difficult path while refusing myself a guide or helping hand. Calculus and chemistry classes began to burden me as they did in high school, and the burden was doubled due to some nasty habits I maintained from my high school days: cockyness in the face of studying, grim acceptance of failure, and a low self-esteem that had begun to plunge into new depths. Thus far, the main narrative of my time at stony brook has been recognizing my own depression and realizing how it has exacerbated those nasty habits I just mentioned, and it’s taken time and priority away from the reasons I go to stony brook at all – education and career preparation.

Why was I so depressed that my school and career focus was so dissuaded? Through cognitive behavioral therapy, I came to terms that it was a diathesis: some sort of predisposition, be it genetic or learned, that would bring my mood down when I encountered some kind of triggering event. What was that triggering event? Mostly dumb stuff from my adolescent days: fretting how people judged me and why girls didn’t like me and common anxieties felt by young men. The little anxieties were corrupted by depressive thoughts to become exaggerated and pessimistic, and entire days would waste away as I ruminated upon every awful thing I could conjure to thought. I find myself only able to write a few words about professional development before wanting to stop while I can type away thousands of pages about my depression — much easier to write pessimistically than optimistically — but this assignment compels me to focus my energy toward laboriously listing my experiences and skills for the workforce. Even in the long-run, these depressive experiences are better left unsaid.

The point is, depression was and is my enemy for academic success: it warped my perspective and it kept me from accomplishing realistic goals, be it focusing on classes or following a thread of career ambition. Even outside of a depressive trough, I would often be just as resistant to resolving my problems in academics and occupation. Be it depressed or not, I put minimal effort into my course material. That was alright for biology courses since I could comprehend most of the concepts at first contact; but the courses that were further steeped in scientific rigor hit me hard semester after semester. I would scrape by with C’s in some classes, but not all the time; and then, when retaking a class I had failed, I would sometimes pass, and sometimes not. People around me (academic advisors and my family, mostly) would tell me I would look back on these failures as only minor setbacks, but I could only see them as steps in a cascade towards doom and despair — because, hey, depression. I couldn’t put these failures into a forward thinking perspective, to decades later when I had the job I had envisioned and really wanted after all of the trials I went through, because I’ve never constructed that future for myself in all my years of indecision and avoidance. That’s when I knew I was in trouble.

Since I switched majors after a string of failures and some much needed time to reflect, I’ve been focusing more on professional development. I chose health science as my new major to make use out of my many biology credits, and because the major department has a professional development angle that the biology major lacked. I figured that it would make up for the time I neglected seeking career paths while I was at Stony Brook, but I still needed to draw upon some inspiration I had the past four years if I was going to follow through on that goal. Even though I didn’t follow through with the idea of being an environmental engineer, I still wanted my career to be something along those lines; the environmental health and safety department (EH&S) within the health science major therefore seemed like a good fit for me. It appeared to me that EH&S professions were more hands-on and featured working with people, which appealed to me more than the cold perspective of a scientist seated upon a mountain of knowledge that I couldn’t keep up with.

At this point, things are – although not perfect – much better than before. I’m exerting greater effort into my course materials while finding time to research EH&S jobs. I’ve also been using the major advisors as a resource instead of going solely off of my own intuition. I’ve also tacked on a writing minor to hone my communication skills that I felt went neglected when I was a biology major; I’ve also been researching careers in environmental journalism and other EH&S jobs where I might make use of my communication skills. I will admit that there I still hold plenty of apprehension and hesitancy in the back of my mind for these long-term career goals that I am still formulating. For now, I must put my head down and plow through any short-term goals and work I have to deal with, while also plowing through the wall of hesitancy and apprehension that stands between me and the hope of a happy future.

I’ve turned my attention to the past – before I came to Stony Brook – to find the skills and perspectives that will help me in a professional environment. As I’ve mentioned before, there are my skills in writing and my knowledge of biology, as well as my interest in environmental issues. However, a new perspective has emerged due to my time at Stony Brook and my many failures and setbacks I’ve had here: a keen awareness of the consequences – good or bad – that any action can take. This realistic sense of caution that I’ve developed helps me stay on track for all of those short-term goals and assignments I have, and so it must also be the linchpin for my professional ambitions. As I plan to go into environmental journalism, I think that would be a very helpful perspective to carry with me: everything that people does has repercussions – good or bad – for their place in this world and their survival in it. There are also so many environmental factors that have positive or negative impacts on people that are completely out of humanity’s hands. Thinking about all of this, I’m struck with a sense of awe and depression at the enormity of it all; it is these feelings, I believe, that will propel me in this field and will push me to help humanity in whatever way I’m able.