Monday, May 18, 2009

Career Path reflections

A few times in the last couple weeks I've had a chance to reflect on how blessed I feel that things have worked out with my career to this point. The other day I was thinking back to high school when everyone would ask "What do you want to be when you grow up?" or then in college, "What's your major?", and even when I had a major (Computer Science), people would ask "What do you want to do with that?", and I'm not sure that for any of these questions I always had good answers. A lot of times I wasn't sure what I wanted to do, or how it was going to connect to the next step of getting me into a career that I would enjoy that would also be sufficient for providing for a family. I always felt bad when I didn't have a good, solid answer for those questions, but I guess I still managed to come out alright, so far, especially considering the job I have in these lean economic times.

Given that I am finally finished with my PhD and started a job that I am (so far) very pleased with, I have no choice but to be grateful for the way that things have worked out. Of course, I didn't even know what Medical Informatics was until a few months before I finished my undergraduate program, so it would have been hard for me to have this as my goal back then. I feel like at each step along the way, when the time came to decide what the next step would be, I was able to figure that out, even if I didn't always see all the way down the road to where it would take me in the end. I'm happy I was able to have faith to take those steps along the way, trusting that in the end I'd be somewhere good.

Seeing some people who are back at the start of that road, wondering what they want to do with their lives, I'm happy to be much further down the road and feel like it's worked out for the most part. But also I would say to them to seek the guidance of the spirit, and have faith in that, and in themselves, and then move forward with faith.

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