Should, want, can, need, regret

I’ve spent the last 3 years working on my PhD in the Engineering and Public Policy department at Carnegie Mellon. My 10-year old self would be extremely proud. Not only do I have knowledge of engineering, but I’m in a program whose mission is to provide technical expertise in policy and decision-making, which must mean that I care a lot about making the world better.

Then why is it so hard to know what I should do after this degree? Maybe the phrasing of that question indicates part of my problem. What I should’ve asked is: why is it so hard to figure out what I want to do after this degree? I have to say, I’d both like to know what I should do and what I want to do. Maybe I just want to do what I should do. I’ve always wanted to do what I should do because I’ve succeeded in school and up to this point that’s always been what I’ve been expected to do. And what I’m expected to do is what I should do because… it’s the path of least resistance? It’s the thing I thought people would be most proud of me for doing? It just happens to be what I’m best at?

So while my 10-year old self would be very superficially impressed, she would be shocked that I wasn’t plunging ahead from PhD to career, filled with certainty and purpose. She’d be disappointed that I’m now thinking about what kind of jobs offer good work life balance and she’d be sad that that I’m feeling a little… tired of school and work.

What does it mean to be doing the best you can do in life? My whole life up to this point has been spent preparing for the next thing–how will the thing I choose to do ever be good enough? Sometimes I get annoyed with myself for not becoming a (medical) doctor; if I were a doctor, I could know I was doing something good, helping people, every single day. That would be so nice to know. I don’t know what my obsession is with feeling confident I’m helping people in this direct way–it sounds like an insecurity as I read what I’ve typed. Realistically, I know there’s other ways to help people than by easing their physical pain. Research just feels so far removed from that. I’d like to think that me calculating a breakeven EV pack price representing how much a repurposer could buy an EV pack for to maintain competitiveness with a recycler is helping people, but, believe it or not, I don’t always feel that way.

I told someone earlier today that I was thinking about doing a post-doc. When they asked me why, prefacing their question with the fact that they personally had thought about post-docs as a way of further keeping yourself in limbo after the PhD, my answer ultimately boiled down to the fact that I didn’t think that at the end of my PhD I’d have built out a solid enough research foundation and vision. So I’d need some post-doc time to do that. I hate that answer. How much preparation will I need to finally feel like I’m ready to exist in the real world?

Anyway, maybe it’s best that my advisor cancelled our meeting to discuss my individual development plan today. It seems I still have some thinking to do.