The Art of Not Knowing

"So what are you gonna do next year?"

The question is as familiar to seniors as "What dorm do you live in?" is to freshmen. It is a part of every-day conversation, a part of small talk, a part of the senior discourse. For many students, answering this question is easy--sometimes even a source of pride. With jobs and grad school acceptances lined up, these seniors know exactly where their next step will be.

For students such as myself, however, answering this question is a bit trickier. "What am I doing next year? Uh, well, I'd like to write. And live in New York maybe? Actually... I'm still not sure what I'm going to be doing."

For the first few months that the question began circulating (sometime back in September, if I had to take a guess), I became terribly uncomfortable whenever I was asked. Until that point, I had known exactly where I was going: In high school, I knew I wanted to go to a school like Duke; at Duke, I knew I wanted to be an English major; and from the time I was little, I knew I wanted to do something great with my life. When asked the question directly, however, I began to feel guilty, suffocated, embarrassed. College would soon be over, the time to begin doing that intangible "great thing" would soon arrive, and I had no idea what I would be doing past graduation. Great.

Perhaps it is because our parents pay over $100,000 to send us here, or maybe it's the over-achieving, crème de la crème nature of the student body, but as a senior, I have felt a tremendous sense of pressure to know, today, what I am going to do for the rest of my life. There is pressure to have direction, to be practical, to get ahead, and Duke students do a pretty good job achieving all three. I was a slave to that pressure until, one day, I realized that I was only 21 years old. I had the rest of my life (or at least a few more years) to figure out what I wanted to do with it.

For whatever reason, many of the seniors I have talked to seem to be under the misconception that our first job out of college is indicative of our future success. It is never openly stated, just felt as a beneath-the-surface tension. From the adults that I've talked to, these students could not be more wrong. Not to say that people with prestigious jobs right out of college aren't going to be successful in the long run, but just that it's okay to explore a little before you settle down to a career path. We are young. We are learning. We will hopefully not be the same people at 30 as we are at 21. We have plenty of time to figure out what we want to do and who we want to be--why not take our time and enjoy the journey?

After adopting a more laid-back attitude on the whole issue of, well, my future, I began to see that this is surely not the only time in my life when I will be faced with uncertainty. Even when I do find a job, there will be bumps along the road, difficult decisions to make and times when I'll think about starting over again. This time of ambiguity can be a learning process; a different sort of "post-graduate education" in a way, as I learn to be patient and resilient and to take what life throws me.

In the meantime, I'm going to keep looking for a job, keep thinking about what I'd like to do, keep searching for a path from which to achieve great things. And when people ask me what I'm going to do next year, I'm going to smile and shrug and say, "I don't know." And that's perfectly fine with me.