LAVINIA ZAINEA

Professional Stereotypes

     I have a friend who claims that the university one goes to is not only meant to give one a particular professional course, but also to shape the way one views the world and interprets it: in short, instead of showing you how to do something, it teaches you how to think. This does not limit to one’s career, but rather to one’s attitude towards life.
    I have friends who study or studied in various areas. Some of them deny that they are part of little professional groups. But some of them take great pride in it. One of them studies medicine and she says that because we are not doctors, we can’t be aware of certain things that are the very essence of her system of values. She says her priorities changed. For instance, if I tell her I am feeling down, she will tell me if I knew what she saw at the hospital every day, I would never say that. That so may things have no solutions, and one must fix what one can, and accept what one can’t. On the other hand, I have a friend who is an engineer who says everything in this world is based on a mechanism: one just has to find the right circuit and fix it.
    So, an engineer will think like an engineer and a doctor will think like a doctor. Simple enough. But what is a person who has a degree in foreign languages suppose to think like: a teacher? A translator? An interpreter? Dare we say a writer? Or maybe like a bank employee? The choice is so vast, it’s hard to list all the possibilities, let alone find a similar trait. The strange part is that throughout the university years, what one learns has little to no connection with some of these professions. Maybe that is the catch: we’re meant to be aware that there is so much more out there than we had ever imagined. Or maybe we just say that to ourselves because we are grateful we still have so many possibities and are not tied down to one thing. Or one train of thought.