Maybe Being a Dilettante Isn't So Bad

If it brings in this kind of email: 

Oh Sherry, my abandoned PhD and newly minted law degree and I identified with that post *so* much.

How awesome is it that you are perfectly positioned to tackle this problem? You have access to all those searching young minds and can help them ward off those pangs. Tell them their mentors will push them to follow a certain path (in direct proportion, it seems to me, to their own nagging doubts about choices made). Tell them, especially the gifted ones, that "can do" and "should do" are totally separate things. That one is really tricky for those of us who have transcended our class backgrounds too - it's hard for blue collar kids to not just sieze that first scholarship or job offer and cling to it. I wish someone like you had been there to tell me!

And this one: 

I hear some complication in the professor's statement, "She's in danger of becoming a dilettante." I was going to write "envy" instead of "complication" but I don't know this professor or the context enough to judge. But it's a complicated statement on its face. Danger. Becoming. Hmm. I hear the anxiety of a specialized teacher whose job is to produce specialists—whose measure of success, in fact, is the production of those specialists—faced with a former student talented enough to become the kind of specialist the teacher could brag about, but who instead turned her back on the special in favor of the general. By the teacher's metric, this counts as a failure—for the teacher. And it calls into question the teacher's world-view and purpose. In basic emotional terms, you rejected him, and the world-view he offered you. That rejection holds an inherent criticism to which his statement, "she's in danger," is a reaction. That's about him, not your career path, which, while fascinating to read about, you do not, ever, need to defend.

And also: 

Your post created a moment of recognition in me because I feel like I
want to be a dilettante, but I'm not very good at it.

I have a tendency to obsess over things, but I (mostly) deliberately
chose to obsess over things that don't have giant structures built up
around them in the world, because I fear that if I did get too deep
into a discipline (as opposed to a subject) I would have a hard time
getting out. I have too much respect for disciplines, but I don't want
to end up in one myself.

And: 

I think it's a crying shame that some people have this association between Big Thoughts and specialization.  In a world full of specialists, there's a huge need for synthesis and bridge-builders (who can and do have lots of Big Thoughts), but there doesn't seem to be much of a home or community or center for those people to collect around.  It seems like everyone who really gets into synthesizing different ideas ends up making their particular synthesis into its own specialization.

It's not entirely clear to me why this is; in academia, I think it has something to do with the journals and the way they're organized around specialist topics, and the huge role they play in academic careers.... 

A couple people wrote to tell me that what I am describing as my main interest is a new-ish profession called a "life coach."  It's true, I think that's a fair description of what I love to do, although in my job I'm doing it specifically for college students as they take their first steps into unstructured adulthood.  As a profession, I am alternately intrigued by and skeptical of the "life coach" literature, but that's because there's a core of admiration, I think.