My Birthday

Happy birthdays and well wishes make March 5th a great day for me.  I hear these sentiments, but I am thinking about a much different set of concerns.  Feeling anxious, I am thinking about my future and what it looks like after I graduate.  I am beginning to realize that there is no career path for someone who wants to own a restaurant, a chain of restaurants, food production on a massive scale.  No, at business school they train people who manage industry, rather than building it.  A very scary thing for me is that I have internalized business school's way of ranking people into the way I rank myself.

I am grateful to Chris Weber, my career advisor, who pointed out that the only person I have to report to is myself.  There is no need to use the business school rubric in figuring out what the best job is for me.  His words are a relief, I've been stressed about this issue for a long time coming.

Do you know the feeling, when you are just working, and you hope that everything will fall into place if you just keep plugging along.  It's a defensive tactic, designed to keep us looking away from what we need to do to make something happen.  The thought goes something like this, if I just keep working on what I know and can do, what I want will happen.  In my experience, things do not end up working out like that.  You've got to look at your goal directly in the eyes and say, damn it, this is going to get done.  Turning away is only going to problems, which always arise.

Then why have I been keeping my head down in business school?  Why did I come here in the first place to put myself through a torturous program with no particular end in sight?  Why did I choose to put my head down and keep on working, working harder than ever if I had no end in sight?  I feel that it is because I had no particular aim that I focused on the MBA as a way trying to let the pieces of my future fall together.

When you just keep working, things have a way of moving along without you realizing it.  It's interesting that so many of my classmates came to school in a similar position to me.