Climbing the Chasm

You’ve been studying for all your life. What comes next? For those of you that feel a sense of dread and being lost when reading that question, I’d like to share my journey of how I started my professional life and give some advice in an effort to inspire you to start “climbing the

With every second ticking away on the clock, the pressure builds, slowly but steadily. For many of us, the studies we’re currently in are going to be the last step in our formal education. And that is going to be over much sooner than we think. A huge part of our lives is going to get ripped out and replaced by… what? What happens then?

For some of us, the answer is clear, and they are looking forward eagerly to their life after their studies, merrily going their way to score their dream job, become fulltime academics or travel to different places in the world. But for some of us, this is a staggered nightmare. Having spent all their lifetime up until now in education, figuring out what to do with their lives can be daunting.

It’s easy to feel unprepared, to feel lost. You’re drifting on an endless sea of possibilities, but without prior experiences, you’ve got nothing to hold on to; no anchor, no safe haven. You’re on your own. I was at that point once, too. For me, it felt more like being trapped in a deep, dark hole – a chasm, if you will. I felt like I had nowhere to go and was afraid to take the first step. I did not see the possibilities.

Nowadays though, I have years of work experience on my hands and I’m pretty much brimming with confidence and clarity about my career. What’s changed? Where did that confidence come from?

It started on a summer night in the fourth semester of my bachelor’s, and I was in quite a terrible mood. You see, at that point I was already going through a really rough patch for various reasons, and it didn’t help to know what was just around the corner. My previous university had a mandatory internship semester and that was coming up. It would be the first time we’d be thrown out into the “real life”without much guidance. Not only did I not know how to do a good application or how to go through all the formalities, I didn’t even know what I wanted to do.

Sure, I had been programming for quite a while, but was it truly my calling as a job? Many job listings sounded very dull at first glance. Also, would my abilities even hold up in a professional setting? I’d never used many of the fancy enterprise frameworks they talked about. It seemed like you needed experience to get experience, some weird catch-22. Just looking at those advertisements was enough to have impostor syndrome kick in. “Who would even take me?”, I thought.

At first, I only wrote one single application, and in the most uninspired way. I just wrote it to the engineering subdivision of one of the largest companies in the region I lived in. But large companies move very sluggishly, so the months would drag on without a reply and the pressure would continue to build.

I didn’t bother to do more. I was still stuck not knowing what to do, and even more so, I was terrified of actually getting a positive reply and being invited to interviews. Those were made out to be such a big deal by teachers in school, that it was hard to imagine myself surviving that situation.

I had all these scenarios play out in my head, trying to figure out what to answer to all the typical, terribly superficial questions, but that proved to be quite hard. Just imagine the audacity – “where do you see yourself in five years?”. I don’t even know what I’m going to have for breakfast tomorrow!

It also didn’t help that over time, more and more of my peers were starting to report their successes in finding a spot. I grew more and more nervous because I was starting to fall behind.

It was on the aforementioned summer night in my fourth semester that I broke through this paralysis. I had just gotten home from attending a concert, with some adrenaline still pumping in my veins. The dread started setting in again as soon as I arrived home, because once again I had to face the unfinished business of caring for my future.

I made a decision. Just to shut up my bad conscience and to be able to say “I tried”, it was now time to force myself to write two more applications to some random smaller denly, I was now in the luxury of being the one who chooses. This was a huge confidence boost, and finally gave me some much needed validation for the path I had chosen to walk in my life.

In the end, I chose the smallest of the three companies, that I’d previously considered the least. To my surprise, what they did was actually much more interesting once you get to see it in person, and they gave me an offer that blew all the others out of the water and exceeded all expectations someone with a mandatory internship could have had.

The main lesson here is that you should never lose hope. Yes, the first steps towards your career are quite scary ones to take. But once you get out of paralysis, once you start climbing out of the chasm, good things can happen.

To those of you that still feel lost, I want to leave you with some advice that I learned through those years:

Don’t sell yourself short, and don’t get intimidated by a “lack of skill”. No matter what it says on the job listing, every entry-level job has some kind of learning period to get you comfortable. The most important thing is to show that you can improve. Ask yourself, who would you yourself rather hire: Someone who can do one thing well forever but never learn new things, or someone who needs some buildup time but can always adapt?

Experiment and play around. Life is really not that serious. Just try out some things and see what happens. I wrote an application that – to me – seemed whimsical at best, but it got me some great years of experience. If nothing else, taking this stuff less seriously can also help you learn to deal with rejection.

Seek out things that make you uncomfortable. You might have heard that one already. But it’s true. A certain level of external stress is necessary for us to grow as people.

Give small, local companies a chance. Some of us think the only way to have a meaningful career is to work for the “big names”, as I did – “go big or go home”. But that is NOT necessarily true. You might get surprised by what else you might find.

Build some skills outside university or do internships. School gives you one point of view of things. There are more out there. Life often differs from theory. If it’s possible in your field, do projects on your own, build a portfolio, get some practice in. This will help with applications, but more so, with your confidence.

There is no master plan. You don’t need to have it all figured out yet, and certainly you shouldn’t feel bad for not having done so. Unexpected things happen all the time, and the more you learn to take advantage of “going with the flow”, the more resilient you will be to them.

And most importantly.

Never, ever, “lie down to die”. From someone who’s experienced the dread of feeling lost, hear me out: You WILL make it.