So I've been holding off on posting anything about grad schools on here because I was worried that I would be rejected from them and then I would have all my lost hopes on the internet forever. It turns out that that was a good decision, because I have been rejected... from all of them... except UCLA... which I will probably be rejected from sometime next week.
A few weeks ago when it had been a month since my Arizona interview and I realized that I was probably going to be rejected from my best hope at going to grad school next year, I had a sort of quarter-life crisis where I realized that I didn't really know what I want to do with my life. For years, I have just assumed that I would go to grad school and become a "scientist" and I never considered anything else, which now seems really stupid. I mean I should have realized that when people asked me what I was going to do with my life and I replied, "Um... research?" that maybe going to grad school wasn't the best thing for me. I'm realizing that maybe I don't have a passion for it. I still love neuroscience, and I love a lot of the research being done in it, but I'm not sure if I want to actually be doing any of the research.
This brings me to my next problem: If I don't want to go to grad school and get a PhD and do research for the rest of my life, then what do I want to do? This question has taken up most of my allotted worry time in the last few weeks. Everyone says that I should just do what I want to do, but what if I don't know what I want to do? What if I never know what I want to do...?
Optometry has been something I have been seriously considering. I really love the IDEA of being an optometrist, but I actually have no clue if I'd like it. I'm planning on shadowing some optometrists, but I'm not sure what good it will do me. I feel like this is such a sudden change that I don't know if I can trust my feelings about it, because what if they go away just as fast as they came?
Currently my plans after graduation are to continue working at the CTO while taking a few extra classes I need for optometry school and moving back home. I kind of feel like I'm jumping into the optometry thing in order to have something to do and something to work towards, but seriously, what else would I do with my life?
I guess I have a lot to think about in the next few months, and in the mean time I'm going to enjoy my spring break and work on my eharmony profile (yes, I joined eharmony, but that's a story for another day).
Since this post was kind of depressing, I'm going to end it with a really awesome song that has been stuck in my head all day:
