Does anyone really know where they see themselves in the next 10 years? 

“Where do you see yourself in the next 10 years?”

The question is a favorite among job interviews and icebreakers for elementary school teachers and college professors alike. “What are your hobbies? What’s your major? Oh, and I know you’ve barely reached the legal drinking age, but what will your life be like when you’re 32?” I never have an answer to it. Despite what they say, I’m sure nobody does. With the new year ending a zero, it’s inevitable to reflect on the past decade and to wonder about the one ahead.

In 2010, I was an awkward (still am) 12-year-old in sixth or seventh grade. That was before I had braces or the dreaded headgear that I was supposed to wear at night. It’s been long enough since then that my teeth were able to misalign themselves again. I often straightened my hair until high school because I was embarrassed by my naturally wavy curls that I now love. It was still considered popular to wear t-shirts with brand names on them in large fonts, converting their wearers into walking billboards for Aéropastale and Hollister.

iPhone 4s were newly out in 2010, but what I had was a slight upgrade from a flip phone which required keypad numbers to be pressed repetitively to generate a single letter. Pop culture staples, including the Avengers movies and Grand Theft Auto V, had just begun to make their marks in 2012 and 2013, respectively. The blocky legend that is Minecraft surged to become the second highest-selling video game ever.

In the last 10 years, I’ve graduated from middle school to high school, from high school to college, and will shortly advance to law school. Every time I check social media, I’m likely to learn a middle school lunch mate is now married and pregnant.

I’m sure the default answer to where you expect to be in 10 years is to be with a family or to work some ambitious career. I am an avid planner — don’t get me wrong — but I do not want to predict where I’ll be in 10 years. Heck, I’m more excited by the prospects of acquiring a taste for foods I dislike than I am about determining my life goals.

Why? Because I don’t even know what the world and society around me will be in a decade; it feels impractical to estimate how I will fit into it. I enrolled in Penn State as a biomedical engineering major, and I’ll be graduating this May with a journalism degree instead. While I don’t want to give up writing, I realized conducting interviews as a reporter doesn’t fit me. I’m going to law school with interests in disability law and intellectual property law, but I wouldn’t be shocked if my specialty is some unexpected offshoot.

Not knowing can be uncomfortable whereas a plan is reassuring. I used to frantically grill myself to come up with a definitive answer of who I want to be in 10 years’ time, but I now assign less weight to the question.

I’ll end up where I end up. I don’t know or want to know who I’ll be in 10 years. But, you know what? I have 10 years to figure it out.

Madeline Messa is a senior at Pennsylvania State University. This article was originally published in  The Daily Collegian and is posted here with permission from Madeline Messa.

Like most of the pictures on TeensParentsTeachers, the picture posted with this article is courtesy of a free download from Pixabay.com.