Identifying Your Passion and Purpose

I tell my students every day to follow their bliss. To take risks. To get in touch with their passions and pursue them as the only real path to a meaningful life. When they come to me for career counseling on what they can do with a History or Gender Studies degree, I help them to identify people they want to help and problems they want to solve before pointing them in the direction of specific jobs that answer those questions. Well, now the teacher has become the student. I love being a professor and a historian, even on the rough, graded-50-papers-and-countng days. And it dawned on me one morning as I was counseling a student, that I hadn't realized that counseling is a big part of my passion and purpose. 

On grey New England afternoons when I'm supposed to be plowing through this quarter's historical journals and reading book reviews of new scholarship in my field, every 30 minutes or so I poke my head out my office door, looking for a student I know or someone who needs  something. Working one-on-one with students is part of the professor's job—some love it, some hate it.I happen to love it. It's funny how you can reach a stage of life and think you have just started to figure it out but the subject that eludes us most is ourselves. And instead of feeling badly that I don't love reading book reviews and journal articles more, I am embracing the discovery of what I do love. And using that passion towards the purpose of helping others. There are many things we could do with our lives. But what do we want to do? When do we get to the point where we listen to what our heart wants instead of what our head tells it should want? For years I have asked my students, "what projects or assignments have you undertaken in college that did not feel like work? Where you lost track of time and become happily absorbed? That's what you want in your job." Yet I never took my own advice. For me, it's teaching and mentoring. In that small moment of listening to ourselves, we find our passion.

 I have learned in my 10 years as a professor that believing in students helps them to believe in themselves. We all need mentors, counselors, people who can see our lives whole and offer constructive assessments of our strengths and weaknesses or who just listen to us with compassion. These people see us honestly yet are committed to our success. I know that this particular (and perhaps peculiar) passion of mine makes a difference to my students. They bring, not just their resume's, but their hopes that I can take the motley pieces of their college career and young lives and drawing on my expertise and experience, fit the pieces together into a coherent whole to help launch them onto their professional paths. I feel like an amazing engineer though I have no scientific skills whatsoever! But I am realizing that knowing others is a great skill, especially in an age when everyone else seems to want to be known. Life is what happens to you when you're busy making other plans; passion and purpose reveal themselves sometimes in the midst of doing something else entirely.