PERSPECTIVE: A fuzzied lens placed on a once-focused future

I've been an English major during my time at Boston University because I knew I'd have no bodies to dissect, no incomprehensible chemistry equations and no Core in the School of Management. I would never be trapped in a lab every week until 10 p.m. surviving on vending machine crackers and Mountain Dew.

That's not to say that I haven't had my share of long nights, frustrating work or difficult exams. However, I like reading, and writing essays is preferable to staring at a lecture hall chalkboard, praying to any available deity that I might suddenly grasp anything in the statistical scribbling in front of me.

I had an excellent, foolproof plan: As soon as I finished school, I'd take off to see the world, returning after a few years to bask in the royalties of my bestseller about my travels, and cap it off with a Pulitzer or two. Those poor suckers in Med. school would still be up to their elbows in bed pans.

Now I'm staring down the barrel of a May graduation, and although I've escaped the stress of planning for postgraduate study (at least for the near future), it suddenly appears to me that I am not qualified to do anything. Anything.

Even the average unpaid internships want nothing short of, say, a degree in nuclear physics you got while finishing your thesis on your time spent rescuing orphans from Nigeria.

Have I really done so little? The résumé I halfheartedly posted on Monster.com seems to show so. "Camp Counselor" is not one of the topmost accomplishments travel magazines look for when selecting new interns and employees. Besides, all Monster's been sending me is computer technician listings. I'm not even going to try to figure out why.

In a move that was partly proactive decisiveness and partly blind panic, I headed over to BU's Career Services to try to gain some perspective on what I could actually do with myself. I was told I could wait for the on-call career counselor in the library it has at the back of its office, which is a large room covered in giant posters reading "Life After College" and "Getting the Job." There are probably more than a dozen bookshelves filled with résumé guidelines, career opportunities, interviewing tips . . . I picked up a huge book called The Vault Guide to Top Internships, which is pretty interesting. It contains listings of "hot" internships, letting its career-hopeful audience in on "the buzz" about each, and there is even a small bee icon to show just how buzzing this stuff is. Maybe.

There were actually some pretty cool opportunities available, like a summer with the Secret Service, or assisting with public relations at top modeling agencies.

When the career counselor finally called me into her office, I didn't even know what to say to her. Fortunately, unlike me, she did not believe that I was a hopeless case for being an English major whose goal in life was neither to teach nor to remain in grad school indefinitely. To help me, she decided that I should take a test measuring my interest in various job areas and other activities that would match up my thought patterns with those of people in careers I should consider.

I spent a half hour filling in little bubbles stating my interest level in "being around construction workers" or "hiking," among other seemingly random activities, but I have faith. BU Career Services believes in me! Well, one would hope so; I'm 40 grand per year down the toilet otherwise . . .

I have to wait a little while for the results of the test to come back, but I'm somewhat relieved. My life is not going to end once I leave college, nor is grad school by any means off the table should I decide on a career requiring another degree.

I think maybe we put too much pressure on ourselves to establish a "path" and a definite "career" straight away. We spend too much time thinking what we prepare ourselves for in college is the only thing we can ever do with our lives. Kudos to those extremely lucky people who know exactly what their passion is in work and life, but I am certainly not one of them, and in fact, I don't know how many of them there actually are.

Is it laziness to want to try something unusual or unrelated to my major after I graduate? Heck, maybe I do want to go preserve Anasazi heritage. Okay, probably not. I do think, however, there are so many more fantastic opportunities available to all of us than we realize, and experiencing something different for a while, be it months or even years, will not ruin our chances at a big-shot "career" someday. It would probably expand our views on work and on people in truly beneficial ways. We have our whole lives to make money; why not have fun now?

Emily Foley is a senior in the College of Arts and Sciences.