Moved this one to "Lifestyle".
Drck said:
Sometimes it is not what you like, it is more about what you dislike. I used to work outside, hard manual and low paying job - talk about motivation! Never ever, after such experience you'll be happy to study anything. Try it for one summer and you'll see.
Same deal for me. One year between high school and university of 50- and 60-hour workweeks breaking my back putting tires on cars and having customers bitch me out over misunderstandings they were responsible for themselves most of the time gave me a motivation to actually get some kind of career where I wouldn't be doing manual labor or dealing with customer complaints all day. I never would've had that motivation without the experience.
Squirrel, maybe what you ought to do at this point is get a job of some sort for the summer, any kind. Do that until next semester. Then decide if you'd like to do that until 72 or whatever the retirement age is when you get there.
Like Drck noted, it's a lot easier to get more direction if you know you definitely DON'T want to do XYZ other thing.
One other note is start talking to people around you about what they want to do and what major they've picked and why they've picked it. I still didn't know what I wanted in my 3rd year of university and had an extremely general major it was going to be tough to find a decent job with (Management). I was fortunate enough to have a roommate who asked me what I was going to do with that major, then said I was never going to find a job with that, and advised me to sign up for the Supply Chain minor - just a few extra classes in addition to what I was already taking for my major, and it'd make me a lot more marketable. He told me about the internships he had and the stuff he'd done to optimize processes and basically turn an entire division of Tyco around during a co-op, which sounded really cool to me, so I signed up for the Supply Chain minor and it ended up being how I landed a cushy consulting gig at a big blue chip company with good pay and lots of business travel (plus eventual paid relocation to SoCal). Without that I'd probably have been running a warehouse somewhere in farm country.
I also applied for an internship at Nike after that roommate's urging that summer, and barely missed making the cut, getting some feedback from the recruiter in a follow-up call that he almost hired me, except for a better-fit candidate who'd already done everything they were looking for before, except that he maybe still wouldn't have hired me anyway because I just didn't sound excited. That annoyed me at first, but then realized this whole getting hired thing was a bit of a game, and it was one I needed to learn if I didn't want to be stuck on the outside. I got a lot more serious about interviews after that feedback - no one accused me of not being excited again.
Between those two motivations, my GPA shot up a lot 4th year after slipping quite a bit in 2nd and 3rd year (from a nearly 4.0 freshman year). Once I knew I wanted a job, and what kind of job, and a good one, suddenly the drive to actually get a decent grade returned for the first time in years.
Chase
