There is a list of blogs too long to include where I aspire to submit a guest post – and have it accepted! While I imagine there will be a lot more submitting than accepting, the goal itself motivates me to improve my writing and focus my content.

In the meantime, I am very proud to be featured this week on my university department’s blog. Interacting directly with college students for a living, I see every day the struggles they face in making some of life’s big decisions (at least “big” at this point in their life). My guest blog is about granting yourself permission to diverge from the path you were originally traveling on when you started college.

It hits close to home for me, and I imagine many others, as I realized pretty early on in college that my chosen career field was not the one for me. But I didn’t change my major. I didn’t apply for internships in different industries. I kept on my path. I was too scared of the unknown to change. So I went into a field that wasn’t a fit for me, and the fact that I now depended on it to pay rent didn’t make it any more enjoyable.

While I learned so much from my first two jobs (yes, two!) in my original career choice, it wasn’t until I started really paying attention to where I felt energy while at work that I realized the right path for me. I was so pumped after every time I interacted with our interns, helping them with a project or giving them advice about transitioning into the “real world.” It hit me that there must be a way to do this for a career.

It took taking the plunge into graduate school and starting back at the bottom in both position and salary. But it was more than worth it.

While my guest blog is directed toward college students, life is really just a series of crossroads and decisions. I hope you will make the jump and read the full post here.

Thanks for reading!