I don’t know what I want to do, but I know how I want to do it.

My fifth (and hopefully final) year of school is starting in a month, so I am supposed to be thinking about what I want to do when I get out now. I would hardly consider myself a trailblazer, but when it comes to finding work, I’ve never liked the way everyone else I know at school goes about it. The idea of shuffling around at a career fair in a tie and standing in line to hand some recruiter my resume to put on top of a stack of resumes from classmates doesn’t seem very creative or an effective use of my time (or the recruiters, for that matter). That’s no way to distinguish yourself, doing the same thing as everyone else, and isn’t distinguishing yourself what finding a job is supposed to be?

Maybe they already know exactly what they want to do, or they’re happy to work for the same companies that everyone else works for; if that’s what trips their trigger, that’s cool. As my academic career has gone forward, I have found that I have less of an idea of what I want to do for a living. Instead of focusing and specializing, I am being introduced to new opportunities every day. Some days, I think it would be neat to be some sort of writer, other days a coder, a web developer, some sort of sysadmin, who knows?

One of the things that reading sites like Brazen Careerist and getting to know all of the people at Conjunctured and Austin Jelly has really made me think about is not what I want to do, but how I want to do it. I envy the independence and freedom that they can work with and the costs that you have to bear as a freelancer don’t seem too bad to me (i.e. irregular/uncertain pay, self-marketing, bookkeeping).

How common is it for college students (engineers in particular?) to move straight from graduation to a career as a freelancer? You see stats all the time about how the graduating class of year X had an average salary of $Y, or you’ll hear about what companies hired a lot of them, but you never hear much about freelancers (or entrepreneurs, unless they’re super-successful).