This is a series of articles to inspire fresh graduates and early career professionals to become the best version of themselves by understanding their own potential in its true sense. I am going to share what nearly four decades of working with young lives taught me about the biggest trap in early career psychology and how to escape it!
There is a conversation I have counted more times than I can count. It begins the same every time. A young person sits across from me – bright, capable, brimming with potential and within minutes say some version of the same thing – “I think I studied the wrong course”.
Sometimes they say it with frustration, sometimes with shame. Occasionally, it is with that quiet devastation that tells me that it has been weighing heavily on them for a long time. Having worked with thousands of young graduates over nearly four decades, I can tell you with complete conviction –
That thought, the one whispering that your major was a mistake.
That you backed the wrong horse.
That everyone else seems to know exactly what they are doing.
While you are quietly flailing – is one of the most common, most painful, and most MISLEADING ideas in the psychology of early career life.
It is also, in almost every case I have ever seen, completely wrong!
The Degree Was Never the Map!
Let us deconstruct the truth about your degree – it was never meant to be a precise itinerary for your professional journey.
It was meant to teach you how to think.
It was meant to give you exposure – to ideas, to problems, to ways of engaging with the world that you could not have discovered on your own at 17.
It was a beginning, not a blueprint.
And yet, somewhere between matriculation and graduation, something insidious happens. The degree stops being something you have and becomes something you ARE!
‘What did you study?’ transforms, almost imperceptibly, into
‘Who are you?’
This is not your fault. It is a feature of how identity forms in early childhood. Developmental psychologist Jeffrey Arnett described the years between 18 and 29 as a period of ‘emerging adulthood’ – a phase defined by exploration, instability, and the active construction of a sense of self. During this window, we reach for anchors. We try to answer the terrifying question of who we are. And for many of us, the most readily available anchor is the thing we spent three or four years studying.
You see, the problem with anchors is they hold you in place. That’s their nature.
Research consistently shows that within three to five years of graduating, the direct relevance of a person's degree to their daily professional tasks diminishes sharply. What actually predicts career satisfaction, advancement, and a sense of meaning are transferable skills.
The ability to think clearly under pressure.
To communicate with precision and empathy.
To learn rapidly in unfamiliar territory.
To collaborate, to lead, to solve problems that did not exist in a textbook.
To persist through ambiguity.
These capacities do not live in a discipline. They are not owned by engineering or psychology or business. They are cultivated by anyone who approaches their education with genuine curiosity and effort — regardless of what subject sits at the top of their transcript.
The Identity Trap – And How It Keeps You Stuck
So why, if the evidence is so clear, do so many brilliant people remain locked in the belief that their degree is their destiny?
Because changing direction feels like losing yourself at a psychological level.
When we have spent years investing in an identity — 'I am a scientist,' 'I am an economist,' 'I am a creative' — the prospect of stepping away from it triggers something that psychologists call identity threat.
It is not simply the fear of starting over professionally.
It is the deeper, more unsettling fear of no longer knowing who you are.
I have watched highly intelligent people remain in careers they found hollow for years, not because they lacked the skills to move, not because opportunities were absent, but because leaving felt like a kind of self-betrayal. Like they would be admitting that the years of studying had been wasted.
They had not been wasted. They had simply served their purpose — and that purpose was not to dictate the rest of their professional lives.
Not everyone who feels uncertain about their career direction is caught in this particular snare. But the following patterns appear with striking regularity in my work:
1. You describe yourself primarily by what you studied and not by what you can do or what you care about
2. You rule out opportunities before exploring them because they seem 'unrelated' to your field
3. You feel a vague but persistent sense of failure as though your career is already off track, even though it has barely begun
If any of those resonate, I want you to hear this clearly –
You are not behind.
You are not broken.
You are navigating one of the most psychologically complex transitions a human being makes — from student to professional, from defined identity to self-authored one.
That transition is hard. It is supposed to be. And it is survivable.
What To Do Instead
The shift I invite most of my clients to make is deceptively simple and genuinely transformative.
Decouple Your “Worth” from Your “Work”
Stop asking 'What can I do with my degree?'
Start asking: 'What have I discovered about how I think, what I value, and where I come alive?'
These are not career questions. They are self-knowledge questions. And they are, I have found, the ones that actually lead somewhere worth going.
Your degree taught you things about yourself that you may not yet have named. Stop looking at the 40-year horizon. Focus on Transferable Wins.
The topics that gripped you and the ones that bored you.
The kind of problems you found yourself drawn to.
The environment in which you worked best.
The moments of genuine engagement and the ones you endured out of obligation.
All of that is the data. Rich, personal, irreplaceable data and it has nothing to do with your job title.
Shift your mental frame from emotional reaction to logical observation.
“The career that will sustain you was never hiding inside your major. It has been hiding inside you all along.”
I have been coaching clients in a wide range of careers and I have watched people who were convinced they had made an irreversible mistake go on to build careers of extraordinary meaning, contribution, and satisfaction. Not because the path became easier, it often did not. But because they stopped measuring themselves against a question that was never the right one!
You did not study the wrong course by choosing the wrong major. You are, perhaps, simply ready to discover that what you are capable of is far larger than what any degree can contain.
It is not a problem to solve. It is a life to step into!
Anxiety thrives on the need for a 10-year plan. The ‘Degree Trap’ makes you feel that if you don’t use your degree now, it’s gone forever.
Adopt a ‘Researcher Mindset’.
You are not choosing a destiny; you are collecting ‘data’ on what makes you come alive!
If this resonated with you, you are not ‘Lost’. You are at the BEGINNING! Want to have a heart-2-heart chat with me to start building something real? I offer a free 30-minute CreateUrCareer Call.
Book your call here - https://coachshaala.com/coach/nagamani-krishnamurthy
About the Author
Dr. Nagamani Krishnamurthy is an educator who started her journey as a chemistry teacher 34 years ago. Since then, she moved on to become a teacher, trainer, coach, researcher, and early childhood educator but at every stage, she retained the underpinning principle of education as a process of nurturing children's EQ and empowering them to be equipped with skills to deal with challenges at every stage of life. She has designed a unique early years curriculum strategy Balavikasa's L.E.A.D. which weaves human values and 21st century skills into child development.
Her passion for creating bespoke teaching strategies has inspired her to design many courses for children at different stages catering to their individual needs and learning styles. She is the founder of Balavikasa Educational Academy where she conducts training programs for children, young people, parents, and teachers. She strongly believes that every child has the potential to excel and every teacher has the power to bring out this excellence in every child.
To get to know more about her, visit https://linktr.ee/balavikasa and reach out to her on balavikasa4u@gmail.com