At a large research university, it can often feel like all your peers around you have it all figured out. Everyone has already secured their summer internship, they are a part of a million clubs and resume-building organizations, and they have already found their perfect career trajectory. I can go ahead and tell you that this is not true (which, for the record, it isn't), but that is not going to magically get rid of your anxiety. Rather, I am going to give you something useful to make your own future less daunting: Career Odyssey Planning.
Dave Evans and Bill Burnett, two professors at Stanford and co-authors of Designing Your Life, introduced the Career Odyssey Plan, an alternative to the standard 5-year-plan that we are used to. Using the same design thinking approach that is used by entrepreneurs as they produce new products, technologies, and services, the Career Odyssey Plan takes the pressure off of you to select the "perfect career path." The activity asks you to create three 5-year prototypes of your own life as follows...
1) Your current life plan for the next five years
2) What happens if plan #1 does not happen?
3) What would you do if money and time were no object?
For each category, describe in detail (and with visuals) how each of the next five years would be laid out. Then, numerically assess the resources you have, your confidence in it, the coherence, and how much you like the plan. Finally, ask the questions you have unanswered about this plan.
This tool helps you approach your life plan with imagination, flexibility, and an understanding that any of these paths can lead to happiness and personal success. There is no ultimate plan and each one can change as time goes on. However, by sketching the specificities of the next five years for each, it also helps you to visualize what you can do in the current moment to feasibly achieve each end-goal.
I encourage you to listen to this podcast from NPR to learn a little more about the odyssey plan and reiterating your life plan: https://www.npr.org/transcripts/546716951
I also encourage you to prototype your own life! Draw it out, change it as time goes on, and take action today!
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