I wanted to take a moment to reflect on the advice I gave to the attendees at the Career Paths Outside of Academia Panel hosted by Co-op and Career.

My first piece of advice:

Don’t compare your achievements to others.

In school, you are mostly among peers going through the same course work. But when you start working, you meet new people with different backgrounds and experiences.

After I graduated, I had friends who were in med school, friends starting their own businesses, friends who were making double what I was. It was hard to know where I fit in. I was not happy with myself because I wanted to be able to feel the same sense of achievement as I thought these friends felt. But what was acutally making me unhappy?

I was comparing myself on a scale that was not meant for me.

As a student, it was easy to know if I was doing well. But after graduation, there’s no universal quantifiable scale for everyone, and I was just blindly comparing, trying to seek some feeling of reassurance. Once I understood that, the next step was to feel sure of myself without making comparisons.

This leads to my next piece of advice:

Define your own success.

I thought hard and long. At what point should I consider myself successful? How do I even approach this question? How would I know what I will want 10 years from now? And that’s when I realized that success is different at every stage of your life. It’s a constant re-evaluation.

I decided to define my current success as doing something that I am good at and something I am passionate about.

And then I felt… easier and lighter. Because now all I had to do was to be good at my job, and maybe do something on the side, like contiuning with volunteer work.

Then, a couple of weeks ago, I was rewarded with positive feedback from my manager after a challenging year. I have learned so much this year, and now I am left with feeling relief (weirdly) and satisfaction — relief from having felt so terrible about myself in the past, and satisfaction of being good at something.

Try not to see your career as linear.

During the panel discussion, I was asked: “Do you think you’ve made the right choice with your career?”

I don’t think I have made the right choice, because saying so would indicate that there was only ever a single correct path for my career to follow.

The notion of the right career, the one job that you find right after school and settle down into, has made so many unhappy. If there’s anything I learned over the past decade, it’s that you can’t start out limiting your choices, and expect life to turn out.

I could offer another personal experience as example: I was doing an internship that to my great surprise, didn’t turn into a full-time position. I was left without a job right in at the end of my undergrad. I remember being miserable. But a few weeks later, I found the job that led to my graduate postion.

Back to that non-linear career

There is just so much in the world, so much available to you. The need to find the “right choice” is something that, in my opinion, we no longer need in 2022. We have so many options that we have the privilege of experimenting with our career. And to me, that’s the most exciting thing about career. Because today I am in co-op, yesterday (not literally) I was in the lab, and tomorrow I may be in IT, the point being: I have options and it’s never the end of the world if the first career I choose does not end up working out.

I have been out of school for more than a decade now, and it took years to feel like I was lifted above heavy clouds — finally able to see clearly part of why I had been unhappy, and how I could start to get better. I am still working on my way to my own success and I hope this post inspires you to do the same!

Disclaimer: I have presented a lot of personal opinions here and in doing so, I do not intend to represent anyone else or any organizations that I am affiliated with. This is purely a personal reflection.