Finding Myself and Saving the World

Lately I've been rather obsessed with self-expression. I think that stems from something I've been dealing with since I moved out, which is figuring out who I am, what I want to be and where I'm going. I know, no small order, right? Well, since I've graduated college and started searching for a job I've had to figure out precisely what it is I want to do for a living. I know, I know, I'm supposed to have figured out all that in college, right? Well, I didn't. College is an amazing experience, but it really doesn't do a whole lot to prepare you for life and a career. As I've been wading through all these job search websites and job listings and talking to people and looking at grad schools I started thinking, and as usual, thinking is my downfall. I had originally planned, back in my naive, no-sense-of-the-real-world college days, that I wanted to work in book publishing and editing. Well, my new, street-smarter self has figured out that that is an EXTREMELY competitive field and nearly impossible to break into unless you have some connections. Which I don't. And even more importantly, I've come to realize that I don't want to work for some evil, giant, soulless corporation. I want to save the world. As naive as that statement is. I want to feel like I'm doing some good in this mad, mad world. That my existence has meaning. That I can help other people. That realization has led me toward looking at non-profits, human rights organizations, and things like the Peace Corps, which I never even considered in college. After all my research, sadly, the Peace Corps is out because even though it sounds fantastic and I would LOVE to do it, I have no qualifications for any of their positions and it is apparently really, REALLY hard to get accepted by them. GRRRRR! So that leaves non-profits and any other save-the-world type positions I can find. However, jobs are not as easy to come by as people seem to think. So until someone finally accepts me as the fantastic employee I will be, I'll have to stick with my resident penchant for self-expression to figure out who I am and make myself into who I want to be.