How can I feel more optimistic about my life goals and ambitions?

May 26, 2007 1:50 PM

How can I feel more optimistic about my life goals and ambitions? (fairly long)

I'm nineteen, about to be a junior in college. I have a very well thought-out plan for my education and career - I'm an art history major, and I want to get a graduate degree focusing on 20th century art and contemporary art (I'm not sure where I want to apply yet).

To be concise: after graduate school, I want to move close to or into a major city so that I can work in a museum (any position) and work toward involvement with the newest and most innovative artists. What I ultimately want is to become a curator to give these artists more recognition.

I think it's a pretty clear-cut plan, even though it involves a lot of risk. Still, the feeling of knowing exactly what I want to - and that I can alter my course as I go along - is amazing.

Since I was about nine years old, I've struggled with very severe social anxiety and occasional depression. I even started college as an English major because I just wanted a job where I wouldn't have to interact with anyone ... I had no idea what I was planning to do!

I still have a LOT of problems with motivation and seeing how my actions will affect my future - I can't see the trees for the forest, basically, when it comes to keeping up my GPA. It's not horrible, and I can still bring it up to 3.5 or higher if I really work on it.

I'm currently doing that with my therapist, who is absolutely fantastic and has helped me tremendously with the anxiety and depression in the last six months, and Zoloft has made it much easier to simply be in class or make small talk. In my last AskMeFi post, I described my anxiety and now I'm doing a lot better. Basically, I had to crouch into the fetal position while walking down the street, started crying in class because the professor looked at me... it was that bad. I've been much more positive about my goals!

There wouldn't be anything stopping me if I was sure I could afford grad school, but every time I tell my parents about my ambitions they tell me that I'll never be able to afford it and I should just drop out and be a medical transcriptionist because I have good reading and typing skills. Everytime I bring up the fact that I'm mainly using loans to pay for my undergraduate tuition, they just say I'm being impractial. I don't know about grad school loans but I would definitely be willing to work to finance it.

I know it involves a LOT of risk to pursue a dream like this but my parents' negativity brings me down. I've talked to them a lot, and they say they'll agree with whatever I want to do but I should prepare to "fail and be poor".

I'm living with them this summer, but I'm hoping that I'll be able to afford a summer apartment for the rest of my college years so I won't have to live at home, and I can just visit. I'd really like to be in control of my own mental well-being, school, and finances but getting no support from my parents and knowing that it is really quite precarious is making me insecure about my dreams.

Any general advice? What could I do to feel more stable and counteract the doubts my past and parents are giving me?

Thanks.

posted by hypervenom to Education (11 answers total)

Well whatever you do, don't read this thread.
posted by hermitosis at 1:56 PM on May 26, 2007

Response by poster: Haha, my parents are absolutely NOT going to finance it, it is all going to be my money and loans if I make it.
posted by hypervenom at 1:59 PM on May 26, 2007

hypervenom, congratulations on your success so far! This is going to sound cruel but you write my parents negativity brings me down. I've talked to them a lot... I would strongly suggest breaking off contact, or limiting it to less important areas of your life. For example, I talk to my mother about once a year, usually about the weather. Your goals are reasonable and achievable; debt is scary but you you can pay it back, eventually; and chances are graduate school will increase your earning potential and enable you to pay off both undergraduate and graduate loans in less time than it would have taken you to repay undergraduate loans had you ended your education at that point.

Just because life is absolutely pointless doesn't mean it should be boring. Go for your dreams.
posted by Grod at 2:04 PM on May 26, 2007

Response by poster: Thanks, Grod! Yep - I really love and respect my parents, but I'm working toward getting them less involved in my school and work issues ... they were really overprotective before I was 18 and now they are having problems with the change, so I don't want to hurt them but it needs to be done.

Especially since I think I'll be able to manage the debt, I don't want them hovering and worrying about how I'm going to finance my education.

"Just because life is absolutely pointless doesn't mean it should be boring" - great quote!
posted by hypervenom at 2:19 PM on May 26, 2007

Okay, my first instinct on reading this is, because I'm a museumy person, is that after grad school is too late. You're a junior in college. You want to work in the arts. You need to set up internships.

This summer would have been perfect, but maybe you can find one for next year. Art internships often don't pay, but there are a slew of benefits to them - you'll figure out what parts of the work are going to be more difficult for you, or even (and I know it sounds scary, especially when you have your own 7 Year Plan) if it turns out to be a horrible fit.

And as someone who works at a hospital for that grad school tuition, your parents may have a point, in a roundabout way. You might want to take a year off while you do volunteer art work or internships, and medical transcription or coding is a quick associates'-type certification or degree. I'm a coder. It makes damn decent money - money which means I can work at the museum as a volunteer, bulk up my museum resume, and then eventually get a museum job.
posted by cobaltnine at 2:34 PM on May 26, 2007

Wait, my first sentence is a little scary. But the art/museum world *is* cutthroat, at least where money is involved. When it isn't, it's a lot more relaxed. For me, working as volunteer first takes a good chunk of pressure off. It's almost like 'practice work.' Now, did I set out to become Vice President or volunteer manager at first? Hell no. But what ended up happening was I found manageable goals, because there was stuff that needed to be done. But working in the field you want to eventually be in will make you feel better when you want to make the leap into the paying half of the field. Still, having a kind of bland skill to fall back on is really useful when the job listings suck, and it beats working Starbucks when you need rent.
posted by cobaltnine at 2:40 PM on May 26, 2007

For fear of sounding relentlessly positive...what exactly is wrong with risking a mistake? What is wrong with being poor for awhile? What's wrong with pursuing a dream, no matter what happens at the end of it?
It's been said before, more eloquently than I ever could, but the journey is where the fun happens. We all focus too much on the destination, and forget to enjoy the ride.
I know I do. But try not to assume that every step you take now will have predictible results. They won't, and that's a good thing!
Whoever said: "life is what happens when you're busy making other plans" was bang-on.
One of the jobs our parents are *supposed* to do is err on the side of pragmatism. One of the jobs you're *supposed* to do is follow your dreams.
posted by Ziggurat at 2:45 PM on May 26, 2007 [2 favorites]

Do follow your dreams, but do also make sure you're being practical about the amount of debt you're taking on, compared to the future salary you'll get. Educational debt is forever -- you can almost never discharge it in bankruptcy. If you can show yourself and your parents how you can afford the debt you're undertaking, that will go a long way towards feeling more optimistic about your plans. I mean real hard facts -- a spreadsheet showing what rent you'll pay, what your monthly loan repayments will be, etc...

Along these lines, you might consider moving to a big city and getting an entry-level job in the arts first, before shelling out for grad school.
posted by footnote at 3:23 PM on May 26, 2007

I work in an art museum as a book editor, and have also worked in my parents' art gallery (my dad's a painter). Definitely think about internships, but do not panic about it. Internships will be very helpful, but I want to assure you that your career will not be made or broken by the fact that you're not doing one this summer.

I would also agree that you do not have to feel committed to going to grad school immediately, both from a personal and a financial point of view. My suggestion would be to take a year or two off between college and grad school, move to a good-size art market (doesn't have to be New York; in fact, the cost of living is a lot easier to manage in a place like Chicago) and look into entry-level work in a museum or gallery. You'll benefit enormously from getting to know the lay of the land of the gallery/museum world a little bit more before you go into grad school (and from a perspective that no internship will really provide), and may possibly even find a mentor in the process.

In the grander scheme, I would try to think about a couple of things. First off, while it's wonderful to have a career track you are excited about pursuing, please try to believe that you don't have to have your life figured out at 19, and that your life may very well not turn out to be exactly what you envision it will be. (My life at 38 is pretty different in many ways from what I expected at 19!)

Also, on a related note, please keep in mind that your life is not going to function on a simple binary of SUCCESS vs. FAILURE. You may indeed struggle financially for quite awhile in your chosen field -- but that will not mean you have failed. You may in fact be succeeding in building a good career for yourself while at the same time living on a shoestring. For the vast majority of people, success does not come in the form of a hefty paycheck (whether straight out of college/grad school, or even many years down the line). It comes from being able to do something we find satisfying and worthwhile.

Finally, try to strike a balance between planning and not-planning. Life is full of uncertainties that you will not even be able to anticipate -- much less control -- in advance. In my experience, the thing to work on is a sense of knowing that whatever happens, you have the capacity to handle it. And to understand that if you take care of today, more often than not, the future will take care of itself.

Good luck to you.
posted by scody at 4:32 PM on May 26, 2007 [1 favorite]

Response by poster: Thanks, cobaltnine, ziggurat, scody.
I will definitely look into internships, because I don't even know the first thing about them because I was afraid to talk to advisors about them, but I could do that very soon!
And I know it's not going to all go according to plan, which is why I'm glad I'll be able to alter my course as things change.
All of it ... it's all very very good advice that I wouldn't have even considered on my own.
posted by hypervenom at 4:57 PM on May 26, 2007

Something I am curious about - are you a first-generation college student? Because your description of your lack of support from your parents reminds me of what I've read regarding the experiences of people from working-class families who were the first in their family to go to college. (I'm thinking of books like Limbo: Blue-Collar Roots, White-Collar Dreams or This Fine Place So Far from Home: Voices of Academics from the Working Class, and I highly recommend reading them whatever your situation.) I mean, no middle-class parent I know would tell their child to drop out of college to become a medical transcriptionist.
posted by needled at 5:13 AM on May 27, 2007 [1 favorite]