I am currently experiencing this uneasy, unsettling, unstable point in my life where I am in my early 20s and have recently graduated from a bachelor's degree at a recognizable university, but have no real career guarantee, or any sort of security. All of this is fine, and really I don't need to know my sure career path, or feel stable, but I feel like society (and my parents) have made all of this become a large rain cloud over my head that constantly pours down on me, saying things like "what are you going to do with your life?" and "what are you going to do that will make you successful?". So of course, I ponder these all the time, whether I can help it or not. This is what I've come up with:
1. Ideally, I would try to find ways to become a costume designer of sorts as my career path, either for film or theatre. I think it would really be great. In Vancouver however, this has been proven quite challenging. So far, it's just been working on small and mostly student theatre and film productions, that have little to no budget. If there is anything that I work on that is actually related to the professional world (i.e. the Vancouver Opera, a show for the Discovery Channel), it doesn't pay and will only remain as construction, paperwork, or organizational tasks that most likely will not lead to design work.
This would then lead to looking at grad school options in other places. During my travels, I checked out a school in London, and tried to check one in New York (will email them...), and looked online at another school in London, and one in Edinburgh. A grad school will probably transform me into a better candidate for internships, making strong and important connections, and ideally, job opportunities in the theatre and/or film industry.
2. Something that I had been thinking about off and on throughout my undergrad is audiology and speech sciences. I got a scare a couple of years ago when I was with my friends and we were in a pretty quiet restaurant. A friend of ours played a high-frequency noise off of his cellphone (something along the lines of the sound a dog whistle makes) and all of my friends were obviously squinting and irritated by it, even though it was played for just a few seconds. I think he did it just to show what it'd be like for a hearing test? I'm not sure. What freaked me out is that I couldn't hear it. I was just sitting there, undisturbed, and unaware that a high-frequency noise had disturbed the air, though I could see that I was the only one not flinching from it. That's when I realized that my hearing was probably is worse condition than my friends, who were all about my age, +/- 1 or 2 years. This really freaked me out. A lot. That's when my occasional thoughts on studying audiology became a little more frequent. I believe that our generation's hearing is going to deplete much faster than it really should. Unless you don't frequent the club and/or concerts, and don't use earphones. I'm trying to use earphones less now, though I still do go to clubs occasionally.
So, I looked into the School of Audiology and Speech Sciences at UBC, and it looks like a really reputable program, and I doubt there will be a shortage of need for hearing doctors in this day and age. It's a masters degree, and it's really competitive. There are quite a few prerequisites that I'd have to meet (I didn't exactly take physics or audiology classes going into an arts undergrad) and I'd compete with almost 200 others for a spot in the Masters of Audiology program, which accepts 12, and Speech Sciences accepts 23. My chances look real good, don't they. This is a Masters of Sciences, too, which puts me in a more compromising position.
I do keep thinking about this though, and if I really wanted to pursue it, I have no hesitations taking the required courses in order to apply to this program.
3. Tattooing.
This is a newer idea, and I blame Kat Von D and
L.A. Ink for this. I've always enjoyed art growing up, and I'm pretty sure I started drawing as soon as I knew how to start writing. I haven't been drawing extensively as of late, even while I was designing at UBC. Though now, I think it wouldn't hurt to take more visual arts courses and expose myself to this world, slowly and observantly. I'll have to more research into artists and art history, and definitely tattoo art, before I should consider this seriously. I recently started picking up the pencil again, and before I went to Prague, I started to really look at pinup drawings and found to really like the work of Gil Elvgren, who's probably inspired a lot of the pinup tattoos we see today. This idea I think will stew a little slower in my head than the other two, only because it will be even more compromising, mainly because my parents will likely never approve - though I try not to let this control my future pursuits, it still does, especially because I still live with them. It really makes me wish that tattoos were less of a social stigma to them, because it is progressively becoming socially acceptable, once people realized that inked people weren't all delinquents, criminals, and sailors, or any other negative tattoo stereotype. I think my mom still thinks that people who get tattoos are stupid, crazy, do drugs, and don't succeed in life. I wish my parents could see otherwise, and were less judgmental. Though I am being pretty judgmental of them at the moment.
ANYWAY.
I don't know what to do with my life. My current immediate goals are to get a second job, and take one costume design course and some visual arts courses at UBC, as an unclassified student. I'll email New York and see what applications are like, and also for Edinburgh too. I'll also see if I'm even ready to apply, though it probably wouldn't hurt to apply anyway.
I honestly hate all of this uncertainty. I don't like this feeling of being "stuck" in a limbo, while time just keeps ticking away. I'll have to make a move, and I'm probably going to try to make myself do something sooner than later.
