I thought I had reached the point that you're at, isla_es, but then these past couple of weeks happened. I'm on the verge of 6 straight months of co-operative employment, but don't even have a job lined up yet. As a Chemical Engineering student, in a field where jobs aren't supposed to be this hard to find, it makes me question if this is really the right field. I might end up using my degree and experience to try to get into Science & Technology policy, or to work for an agency such as the EPA, as opposed to your traditional Chemical Engineering jobs. At this point it's so up in the air. At the same time I've been having a lot of thoughts about institutions and bureaucracies as a whole, to discern if any of them really care about an individual person to the capacity of being able to help them. At the same time it's caused me to question who I am, and who I want to be. Though much of this is derived from reading Albert Camus' The Myth of Sisyphus. It's been a tumultuous past couple of weeks.
The same as any other engineer really, apply to a lot of places and hopefully one hires you as a student. I can do anything from Mechanical based work to Environmental work. The disheartening thing is that I've applied to >50 and have only had one interview, despite a decent GPA, good extracurricular and work experience. I really don't know. It's essentially an essay on suicide and absurdism. Suicide is, admittedly, something I have thought about a lot in the past. The absurdism part though, that's what is getting to me. It's really making me question everything, and the general absurd nature of life. You live maybe 80 years, and within a fifty of dying you're probably long forgotten. So the question arises is it really worth working 40 hours a week for ~40 years? What is the real value of money past the point of survival and some comfort? Would I be happier packing up and taking a while to see the world, maybe change my career? Is the world really as cold of a place as it makes it out to be? Am I with a girl that I can spend the rest of my life with, and can we make it through the long distance (another entirely absurd thing)...just...so many questions now. It's overwhelming.
I've actually been to Europe twice already. One for ten days (3 days in Switzerland, 7 days in France), then again for a summer study abroad in France. I've found that I get the itch to go back every 2-3 years.