New ask Hacker News story: Ask HN: How do I find a career path?

Ask HN: How do I find a career path?
4 by nocyno | 2 comments on Hacker News.
I am a rising senior and CS major at a good STEM college, with a very good GPA. However, I feel lost about what I want to do with my life. I used to be passionate about CS but lost it after high school, but chose to keep going with it because it is lucrative and I am good at it. I interned in software development last summer and my experience confirmed my suspicion that I dislike CS and would find it really unpleasant to work a 9 to 5 job where my main task is programming. I have resented CS and saw it as something I just had to do, and so have not done any research in college. I really only have 1 internship under my belt, but did not feel like I made a huge contribution where I was. My true passion languages, specifically Chinese (high level) and Japanese (basic conversations), and I want to try living in Japan (I am from the US). I love languages, so I have considered studying NLP or machine translation, but honestly am not sure if that will lead to a job I still dislike given I do not like CS. I am looking into applying to grad school to have a competitive edge in a specialized CS field. The applications are this fall, and I feel like I do not have much to on my resume other than 1 internship, good grades, and a good GRE score. I was thinking about applying to work at a company in Japan, like Microsoft Japan, etc. and work there for 1 or 2 years to get the experience of living there while doing things I could put on a resume to grad school, and find something I am interested in along the way. I do not know what my chances are of getting such a job there is, especially now with COVID. My question is how should I go about finding a career path I will enjoy but also provide for me? Am I rushing into grad school? Should I work in Japan for 1 or 2 years (my favorite option), should I work for a company in the US, or should I do post-bach research? Is anything I am saying even worth trying, or am I on the completely wrong path? Thank you so much!

No comments