Another Friday night and here I am – slouching in my uncomfortable dorm chair and staring at my bright computer screen, the only other light illuminating my dark room besides the Christmas lights hanging atop my twin bed. I thought I figured this out last week, but here I am again, wearing my pajamas with my tea mug in my hand, about to Google-search “personality tests” for the millionth time in the past six months. I slide past the purple links in search of a test I have not yet taken. I wonder whether I’m the only person in the world who reaches the third page of results from a Google search. I finally stumble upon a blue link, and I am filled with hope that maybe this time my college major will be revealed. 

I spend the next 20 minutes answering questions and praying that the site won’t ask for my credit card information when I press the “see results” tab. Then, I scroll down and see my fortune: podiatrist. I Google it and see its definition: foot doctor. Oh well, there goes another personality test, and I still can’t find what I’m looking for. It’s fair to say that it is not easy to look for something when you have no idea what you’re looking for. In this way, searching for my purpose resembles the BeanBoozled Challenge, in which a person reaches in the candy bag for a jelly bean without knowing whether he or she will get the yummy one or its foul twin of the same color.

This is not the case for me only. In fact, all my other freshman friends are encountering the identity crisis that I like to call “being pressured to choose a major as a child.” Not to say that 18-year-olds are immature and can’t make decisions on their own, but how can we know what career is best for us when we barely know who we are? For this precise reason, the vast majority of college students change their major multiple times. It becomes a guessing game where students reach into the candy bag looking for a color they think they will like, without knowing whether they will get chocolate pudding or canned dog food. Only by chewing the brown jelly bean (or taking a class in a particular subject) will they discern their liking of it. Therefore, the result consists of frequently reaching into the bag to guess again or going to their advisor to switch careers once more.

Before meeting my advisor, I usually lie awake at night playing different jobs in my mind. Sometimes I am a marine biologist who jumps out of my lab crew’s boat to dive under the cool, crisp waves of the Australian sea. I sink deeper and deeper into the ocean with my laboratory equipment to collect a sample of an algae that my team and I are trying to study. But wait, what if I could be a preschool teacher and spend my days building relationships with children? I could rock a regular schedule with summers off and spend my days in a room filled with three-year-olds and the concentrated scent of baby wipes, Play-Doh, and apple sauce. However, I have always been interested in health. I become thrilled by the idea of sliding my ID every morning with a warm cup of coffee in my hand to get into my lab, a place where I schedule my own experiments and answer my own questions. I would live a life without the draining pattern of routine; instead, I would thrive by traveling to conferences, publishing in journals, and having intellectual conversations. I can see myself feeling the touch of the cold metal of my microscope against the cool skin under my eye, smelling the fragrance of latex gloves and alcohol sanitizer. I talk to my pathology team about a new virus I have observed and how immune cells respond to it. Maybe there’s a way that I could use this virus to hijack macrophages into eating cancer cells.

These stark differences illustrate the conflicting interests that I wish I could explore.

My mouth salivates as I savor these ideas without actually experiencing them. That’s the thing, I won’t ever be able to experience these options as long as I am pressured to join a program. Each program has different requirements, and I can’t afford to delay my graduation.

I desperately wish I could savor all the jelly bean flavors before attempting to choose the best one for me; however, for now I will have to settle for imagining their taste and guessing the most appropriate one. I may or may not be taking another career test in a couple of months as I encounter yet another quarter-life existential crisis.