I decided not to plan my future. I told my parents in the beginning of my senior year. Most people would have had a list of graduate schools to apply to or at least several companies to go for. After all, being an NYU Abu Dhabi student gives you the leverage of knowing all the opportunities you can grab. Instead, I decided to experiment with something else in my life: to have no plan at all.

The decision was not without reasoning. Planning for nothing was not a luxury I could easily afford. I had been supporting my family back home and working multiple jobs, even during semesters, to support my younger brother’s education. Having no plan was not because I had a place to fall back on — it was a combination of calculated risks and a strong desire to trust my intuition.

In the beginning, I wanted to be a diplomat. I started a small humanitarian NGO with friends back home, I chose NYUAD’s Political Science major and I took classes related to international relations. In my sophomore year, with the support of NYUAD’s Career Development Center, I interned at the Embassy of Indonesia for the European Union in Brussels, Belgium. I saw firsthand what it was like to be a diplomat in a mission, from speaking eloquently to learning how to set up your apartment’s electricity in French. After a few months, and with guidance from the diplomats I worked with, I learned that diplomacy might not actually be the best fit for me. I figured out that I am an impact-driven person, and the diplomacy environment can be very stagnant when it comes to creating a new approach to an existing situation. My mentor, the minister counselor himself, advised me to first explore many other areas before deciding on diplomacy as a career.

In my junior year, I took business classes at NYU Stern. I was introduced to an NYU professor and I audited his MBA-level class to learn about business and human rights engagement. That course opened my eyes to the unique contribution that everybody could give to a society, to the idea that sustainable impact is a multidisciplinary collaboration. Auditing an MBA course also helped me notice that going to a graduate school is not a default option. One must know exactly why going to graduate school is necessary for their future and which program best delivers the tools that would help them in their career.

In the summer before my senior year, I left New York City to do my capstone in Indramayu, a rural area of Indonesia. With the help of NYUAD’s Social Science Department and my mentor, Professor Abdul Noury, I received funding to conduct a field survey observation. After working with survivors of human trafficking through the NGO that my friends and I started back in my sophomore year, I saw that there might be a relationship between poverty and a lack of information on legal work given to young potential workers. Many human trafficking survivors that I knew were young potential laborers who received little to no information and were desperate for any opportunity. I created a small team of four, including local Indramayu college students, to do my capstone. The project was to involve 700 young individuals across the Indramayu region, which was challenging to travel across.

As I entered my senior year with all of those experiences in consideration, I noticed that I was not like some of my classmates who had already decided what they planned to do after graduation. I asked myself a question repeatedly: What do you want for your future, Dhia? I was hoping to find a somewhat similar “this is it” type of answer that my friends seemed to have found. I, too, was anxious. However, my intuition and my observations about my own life continued to assure me that my next path truly is the result of several possibilities.

Unlike going to elementary school and then middle school and so forth, this time the choices were wide open. What was ahead of me would also shape my future. Hence, my senior year was actually an opportunity. It was in fact one of the keys to determining what my next path in life would be.

What do you want for your future, Dhia?

The key component that I am sure I would like to keep in my future is the ability to contribute to society and to have a meaningful life. I decided to do exactly that in my senior year and learn how to impactfully contribute to the world through the things I had already started. I wanted to do my best for my capstone because I knew that this research could shed light on human trafficking problems and youth employment challenges. I took filmmaking classes and music engineering classes not only because I love art, but also because I wanted to gain the tools to touch society through melodies and stories. I became a member of NYUAD’s Residential Education team as a Resident Assistant, and this helped me learn how to effectively serve the needs of our community. To do all of these well, I needed to be present in the moment.

Every time someone asked me what my plan was, I always responded: “There is no plan for now, I just want to focus on what I started.” In the end, my intuition was correct. What I needed to focus on was what was in front of me, not what exactly would happen in 5 years. By allowing myself to not have any plan beyond NYUAD, I got to focus on my senior year; by doing that, my future after NYUAD was also impacted. Just a few days after I finished my senior year, I received a humbling invitation to collaborate with several NYUAD professors to continue my research. I am currently working on that in Indramayu. I also recently received an opportunity to present my capstone to the Ministry of Manpower of Indonesia, and my capstone was adopted as one of the references for their program to prevent human trafficking across the country.

I think of life as a journey. A traveler should know where they are heading, but along the way the most beautiful moments in life are sometimes unplanned. Meeting dear friends, loving the food I ordered by accident, loving that random class I took because my first choice was full and other impactful moments are often the result of an impromptu decision. So, not having anything exactly planned for my future was not a dead end at all. In fact, I was about to enter an adventure of limitless possibility. I have my destination to focus on, but it is also nice to take one step at a time, enjoying the view in front of me. Living in the moment was the best plan after all.