I have always thought the world used to be a much more exciting place than it is today. I am not about to argue about the superiority of ’90s boy bands and the Spice Girls to Lady Gaga and Lil Wayne. Sure, the world is pretty great nowadays. We have things such as airplanes, the Internet, texting and cheese in a can. But do these or any of the countless number of other advances actually make my life more vibrant or thrilling? Aside from karaoke, that is, which clearly does.

It used to be that you could wake up in the morning and do just about anything you wanted. And while you had to do so without the benefit of a 4G cell phone, it was still pretty great. If I wanted to be a pilot, a deep-sea diver, a butcher or an accountant, I could do it. Today, I would need a medical exam, extensive training, a variety of different licenses and a college degree to pursue almost all of those professions.

Historically, a well-educated person was someone who was knowledgeable in different fields. Italian artist and Renaissance man extraordinaire Leon Battista Alberti perhaps articulated this best when he declared that “a man can do all things if he will.” Rather than striving for unparalleled expertise in an almost trivially precise field, people in the past did what interested them, and the world was better for it.

I am what my mother exasperatedly refers to as a big-picture thinker. I will decide that I want to do something and then do it, leaving the details to sort themselves out. Now entering my senior year, I am faced with the increasingly immediate question of what to do with the rest of my life. When faced with that question, my initial response is invariably “save the world.” Generally, that elicits a weird response, and I quickly try to explain that I want to go into the nonprofit sector to work on international development and human rights, but mostly I am not really sure.

If any of you are like me (and I hope for my sake that you are), you may not know what you want to do after graduation. This confusion may be because you do not know what interests you, in which case reading this article will not help you. However, if you are like me, your confusion may stem from your eclectic and seemingly discordant interests. I am here to tell you that your prospects may be more promising than you had previously envisioned.

I am not saying we should all strive to be poet-philosopher-astronauts, though that would be pretty awesome. What I am saying is that as you navigate your way through college and out into the real world, you should not limit yourself. Of course, I am the idealistic, soon-to-be-impoverished humanities major, so take my advice with a healthy dose of skepticism. But I do believe there is plenty of room in the world to pursue anything and everything that interests you. I am confident that I will eventually figure out what I want to do with my life, and in the meantime, I am going to have a great time doing it.

Rob Riker is a senior history and government and politics major. He can be reached at riker at umdbk dot com.