Danny Dunston was like most kids growing up in the 1980s: he liked comic books, playing sports, and professional wrestling. He even wanted to be a pro wrestler when he grew up, because, as he says, “they were bad-ass. They got the women, they smack down the bad guys, they drove fancy cars, stuff like that.”
Like many wrestling fans, Danny was disappointed when he discovered that professional wrestling was staged (aka “Sports Entertainment”), so when people asked him what he wanted to be, he changed his answer to “comic book artist.” But like most kids, Danny grew up without really taking his future career seriously. As he recalled during our phone interview, “I liked a lot of stuff, but I never had any pinpointed interest whatsoever. I liked to draw, but I also liked football, and I never wanted to be a footballer. I never had any real career thoughts in mind, at all, even when I left high school.”
Sound familiar? While some kids grow up knowing exactly what they want to do and stick with that career choice for life, most of us take a winding path to find our vocational happiness. (That’s sort of the point of this whole blog, in fact.) And Danny’s story encapsulates a common theme for many young adults trying to sort out the problem of what to do.
“I never really thought about work,” Danny said. “I just thought, ‘great, I'm having so much fun now, but soon I'm going to have to get a job.’ I thought I was going to have to work with IBM and do computers [like my dad].”
So Danny floated through high school with a vague idea that, as he put it, “you go to college, they hand you your diploma and along with it a job, and that's your life.” He put off registering for courses during his first semester at the University of North Carolina for so long that eventually his father registered for him. His dad, ever practical, signed him up for business courses, and Danny decided to give it a try because it seemed like a good way to get a job that would make a lot of money.
“So I started taking classes,” Danny said, “but it never occurred to me to ask, do I like this, because I thought I didn't need to like it.” But he soon discovered that, unlike high school, he wasn’t able to coast through. “In high school, I would do my homework, and that was all I needed to make A’s and B’s, but in college you have to study and stay up late and memorize it, and if you don't like [the subject], you're going to hate your life.”
“So I ended up really not liking it, and my roommate was taking biology. So I asked, ‘What do you do with biology?’ He said you work with animals or something, and I thought, ‘I like animals,’ so I signed up for biology.”
It’s at this point in our phone interview that Danny assures me, “I do have a brain, but it doesn't fire sometimes.” But every year, thousands of college students choose majors for very similar reasons. Why? Because they don’t think it’s possible to find and pursue a job you really love.
After graduation, Danny worked in the basement of a university helping distribute chemicals to the various labs around campus. While the job itself wasn’t so bad – if boring – what he really didn’t like was the environment. “I had to work in a basement where they worked on lab animals, like monkeys and rats,” he said, “and once a week they'd kill all the rats. It was awful.”
So Danny quit working at the lab and got a job at a greenhouse that specialized in decorative grasses. He did well, but he was bored out of his mind. “I was getting kind of scared, because…in high school everything was fun. I was doing student council, hiking, football, track; in college and afterwards, it was awful, I sucked at everything, and it was horrible. I felt like something was wrong with me.”
Danny later realized that he was going into jobs with the mindset that “it’s work, you won’t like it,” and sure enough, he was bored and frustrated at every job he took. Eventually, he was so miserable that he decided to do some research and consider going back to school.
Danny read a lot of books about choosing a career, but the one he found most helpful was What Color Is Your Parachute? by Richard Bolles. (Bolles also has version of the book directed at high school students, aptly titled What Color Is Your Parachute? For Teens.”) After completing the exercises in the book, Danny was left with four suggestions to pursue: architecture, landscape architecture, graphic design, and mechanical engineering. He took his list to North Carolina State University and spoke with some professors in their design and engineering programs. They let him sit in on some classes, and Danny finally felt at home in landscape architecture. He said, “I felt like I would be on permanent vacation if I could be in that world.”
Danny decided to go for broke, move to Baltimore, and attend Morgan State University because they would allow him to start the following fall; NC State would have made him wait an extra year for admission. Over the summer, while he was preparing to move north, Danny took a class in Computer Assisted Design (CAD), and he fell in love with it. “I had so much fun,” he said. “I have ADD, but I could sit there for eight hours and work on autoCAD and have no problems.”
Danny finished graduate school and has been working as a landscape architect for a few years now, and even met his lovely wife – a building architect – while he was completing his internship at a Baltimore architecture firm. What advice does he have for students trying to decide what kind of career to pursue? “Don't go work at a grocer, don't work at the YMCA. Find out what kind of work you're interested in and go get an internship. That's how you're going to figure out if you're really going to like it.” If you can figure it out before you get to college and have to choose a major, even better: Danny said that "the kids at UNC who did the best were the ones who knew what they wanted to do and had done the research. They hit the ground running.”
But how do you find out what appeals to you? Check out books like What Color is Your Parachute. Keep reading this blog to learn about jobs that you might not ever have thought existed. Talk to people in fields that sound interesting to you. And keep in mind Danny’s words of wisdom: “The biggest lesson to learn is to figure out what you like and why you like it and go after that.”
No comments:
Post a Comment