My search for a career path during college was a morass of confusion. I began as a pre-med major, but dropped out my sophomore year after fainting on two separate occasions in the hospital while shadowing a physician (my father).

I switched to English, but that only lasted one semester on account of William Shakespeare. Next was pre-law, which I loved, but a full day shadowing my professor in her Oklahoma City prosecuting attorneys office convinced me I wasnt mean enough to be a good lawyer.

I was at the end of my junior year by this point... and clueless. Id enjoyed my philosophy classes the most, plus it was a small major that I could still complete before graduation, so I became a philosophy major. My parents were not thrilled. Today I am a philosophy professor, and there is not another job Id rather have.

All of that makes me doubt there is a clear strategy for finding the right career path in college, but here are a few recommendations, which I have formed through the years reflecting back on my college experience.

First, do what you can to sharpen your discernment skills. Its a bit clich矇 now, but I think there is something to Frederick Buechners definition of vocation as the place where your own gifts meet the worlds needs. If something like that is true, then you need to be able to carefully discern what youre good at and what the world needs.

The two best pieces of advice I have for improving such discernment skills are to be intensely moral and to seek out unlikely friendships. Leading a consistently moral life will protect you from lots of self-deception that clouds understanding who you are and what you can do.

And seeking out friendships with people who are deeply different from youin terms of gender, sexual orientation, race, class, ethnicity, etc.will put you in a much better position to understand the world youre hoping to care for through your work.

Second, you should seek out good advice about what different jobs are like. Although Im happy to be a philosophy professor, I think I would have, in fact, made a good doctor or lawyer. I dropped both pursuits on the basis of what I now consider faulty judgments. Ive since learned that many physicians struggle with queasiness in the early days of med school, and Ive since learned there are other kinds of lawyers than prosecutors.

But, believe it or not, I never asked people about these things. I just assumed I wasnt fit, and I packed up my backpack and moved to another department. So theres something to be said for striving to understand in detail the field you are considering. To do this, youll have to be proactive.

My college experience taught me that professionals are often the least likely to tell you the ins and outs of the profession; it has become so commonplace to them they cant remember the questions they had starting out. So you have to ask those questions, to the point that you may feel you are being a pest. Dont worry about it.

A third and final piece of advice: Although it is important that we Christians find good work to do, dont get sidetracked by the mistaken idea that there is one specific will God has for your work-life, which you have to somehow puzzle out. If God wants you to do something specific, God will tell you in no uncertain terms (as God told Moses and Paul, for instance). Otherwise, you dont have a specific work calling. You are, as William Stringfellow observed, called in the Word of God宇o the vocation of being human, nothing more and nothing less名ithin the scope of the calling to be merely but truly human, any work, including that of any profession, can be rendered a sacrament of that vocation (A Keeper of the Word, pp. 3031).

As far as I can tell, none of our biblical exemplars had careers. In their various ways, they tried to serve God and neighbor faithfully in whatever work fell to them to do. Unless otherwise notified, that is your calling, too. So you are free to just try to find work you will like and be good at, and give it a shot. If it doesnt pan out, your education at 51蹤獲 should have suited you well for getting another job.