Discovering Your Passions
Clearly, exploring your passions through research can be an incredibly powerful personal and intellectual experience. One of the first steps to getting started on research is having a specific area or passion that you would like to explore. But what if you’re still unsure what you want to dig deeper into? How can you explore a variety of questions and ideas before embarking on your research journey?
This is a very important step. Discovering your passions can help you to find your hobbies, your major in college, and even friends with shared interests!
How do I find my passions?
The good news is that there are a variety of ways to learn more about potential passions, ranging from online quizzes, to in-person chats with friends and experts in your community.
The first part is asking yourself: what sparks joy for me? What do I find myself daydreaming about? What gets me excited just talking about it? It’s ok if these don’t feel like specific areas to explore yet. Understanding the things that can provide a positive feeling and curiosity is a great start! This will give you a series of threads that you can then pull on to learn more.
If you’re still feeling a bit stuck, that’s ok! There are a variety of ways that you can learn more about yourself and your own interests.
Surveys/quizzes: Services like Youscience and Futurescape help you learn about your preferences and passions in different ways, through interactive games and surveys. By working your way through these services, you’ll end up with a better understanding of what really sparks your interest and potential fields of study and careers that align with those interests.
Pathfinders: Our Pathfinders program is built to help students along their journey of self understanding. Pathfinders pairs you with three different expert mentors in fields of your choice that will help you to better understand their world and their path. This is a wonderful way to get wide exposure to folks who have already embarked upon a long academic journey.
Informational Interviews: Have you ever listened to what someone does for work and thought, “that sounds really cool”. It may sound obvious, but just asking them more about their job and passions is a wonderful way to learn and to see if the topic resonates with you. This is considered to be an informational interview. While it may seem like a big ask, folks generally love talking about themselves and how they got to where they are. Informational interviews can really be fruitful when you come prepared with specific questions about things that interest you that your conversation partner might be able to answer.
How to find Research Subject and Foundation Knowledge?
UN SDG Knowledge Database
