Vocation

My friends and I call it “the million dollar question.” It’s the one every adult (and a lot of your peers) ask you as you get closer to graduating college:

“What are you going to do next?”

Terrifying, right? There is a myriad of questions contained within that one query. What do you want to do? Where is your future going? Do you even have a future? Is it a good one? Because it better be.

For awhile, my plans have been vague. I know what I want to do eventually–humanitarian work in an interfaith context. But insofar as graduate schools or specific job titles go, I’ve been hazy.

Then, this past week, I received an email from BU’s School of Social Work, inviting me to an information session. Before this email, I’d immediately associated social workers with foster care and child services. Not that there is anything wrong with the profession–but it had never appealed to me. However, as I read the email and then visited the School of Social Work’s website, I realized how many more avenues an MSW (Master’s of Social Work) can take you down.

Working for social justice. Doing interfaith collaboration. Helping the homeless, the elderly, the underprivileged. Aka things I am intensely interested in.

And so, due to this fortunate email (plus leanings I had already been feeling), I have decided to look at dual degree Masters of Divinity and Masters of Social Work programs. It’s excited–I’ve already cobbled together a list of schools that offer the program (and are in geographical locations I want to live in).

University of Chicago. Union Theological Seminary. Harvard Divinity School. Of course, Boston University. And many more. It’s exciting to envision myself there, exciting to have an actual idea of what I might want to do.

And, perhaps not as important, but still satisfying, it’s exciting to have an answer to “the million dollar question.” Or at least more of one than I did before.