Wearing her black JanSport backpack crammed with organic chemistry textbooks, sophomore Carly Dworkin makes her weekly trip to Shands at UF to volunteer in the hospital’s emergency department.
Dworkin, a biology major, said she always wanted to work in the medical field, and she knew that she was meant to be an obstetrician since high school.
“There is nothing more rewarding I could do with my life than deliver babies,” she said. “There’s something telling me that I belong here and that I’m going to work my way up and become a doctor. There is no ‘What if I don’t make it?’ There’s just do.”
A recent study at UF, which was published in the September issue of “The Career Development Quarterly” journal, found that almost half of incoming college freshmen surveyed at a large East Coast university felt that they have a “calling” to a certain career.
This is contrary to the popular conception about college students, who are generally thought to have no clue what they want to do, said Ryan Duffy, a UF psychology professor who led the research.
Duffy, along with William Sedlacek, an emeritus education professor at the University of Maryland, looked at 5,523 incoming freshmen ranging in ages, races and backgrounds. About 44 percent said having a career calling was “mostly true” or “totally true” of themselves, and 30 percent said they were searching for one.
“They actually have a really good sense of what they want to do and feel like there’s this one career path that’s what they should be doing with their lives,” Duffy said. “I think our study kind of debunks that myth that all these students are just wandering around aimlessly.”
Duffy said that the notion of a “calling” is something that is becoming more of a secular term, whereas in the past it was used in a more religious context. Mainstream culture has begun perpetuating this philosophy within the last four or five years with slogans such as employment website Monster.com’s “Find your calling” and a recent “O, The Oprah Magazine” cover asking readers if they are living their calling.
“I think that the idea of a calling is something that recently has become a little more nomenclature, and people use the term a little more,” Duffy said. “Probably on a weekly basis, I’ll hear someone in an interview or something say, ‘I’ve found my calling.’”
From a scholarly standpoint, there has been little to no research on this until recently, so there’s almost no basis for comparison to years past, he said. However, there is very little difference in terms of test scores, GPA or overall happiness between students who have and have not found a career path they feel destined for.
Although students may have an idea of what they want to do, current conditions dictate that being open to multiple options may be the wisest choice, Duffy said. Research in the future will focus on whether it’s positive for 18 year olds to have a set career path.
“While the percentage of people who have a calling is pretty stable, about a third of the adult population, the percentage of people who are actually doing their calling is probably substantially less now because the economy is so bad and the ability to choose jobs is so low,” he said.
While a large percentage of students feel certain of what they want to do, many may change goals or take longer to narrow down their options.
Senior telecommunication production major Mike Jenkins spent his first three years at UF as a chemical engineering major and switched to the College of Journalism and Communications in the fall of 2009. Despite coming into college with a passion for chemistry, he realized he wouldn’t be happy with a career as an engineer, he said.
“I took a film analysis class as an elective while I was still an engineering major that really opened my eyes to the world of film and the stuff behind it,” he said. “Ever since then, I’ve become enamored with it and knew that’s what I actually wanted to do.”
Sophomore exploratory major Daniel Karpel said that he believes that students should take whatever they want and not be hindered by the implied need to choose a major as soon as possible. He has enjoyed being able to take classes he wouldn’t have been able to otherwise, such as Chinese.
“For me, college wasn’t about what do I want to do, it’s what do I want to learn,” he said.
