Don't panic, don't panic, don't panic, I tell myself. You still have eight, seven, six more months left to figure it out.

So when I walked into the Anthony Joseph Biddle Jr. Lecture on International Studies last month, featuring three Duke alums from the Class of 1995 who had all forged careers in international service, I was not expecting to get anything other than some interesting stories out of it. These were polished professionals who had traveled widely, who were settled, who seemed to know exactly what they were doing. What did they have to do with me?

But over the course of an hour and a half, Sonya Wu-Winter, Mark Lorey and Damon Wilson took me and several of the other students in the classroom back to a time when they too weren't so sure about the next step, when they too were grappling with significant crossroads in their lives.

Embrace uncertainty, they said. Step outside your comfort zone. Find and follow your passion.

During the lecture, I was struck by Sonya, Mark and Damon's courage-their willingness to step off the beaten path and to throw themselves unflinchingly into what they love.

But at some point in their lives, when they arrived on campus, they were just like us. Young like us. Eager like us. Uncertain like us.

Growing up in the rural Buies Creek, North Carolina as a kid, Damon Wilson had seen little of the world. Instead, he spent his days collecting flags (at last count: 555), typing up letters to President Reagan in his father's office at Campbell University, and dreaming of bigger things. He remembers being fascinated when a boy from Romania--the son of a political dissident in fact--transferred to his elementary school.

"All of this led me to Duke," Damon says. "I arrived here thirsty for an international experience."

To that end, he spent his four years as an undergraduate seeking out service opportunities abroad, hopscotching from continent to continent, participating in programs in Estonia, the Balkans, Turkey and France.

After graduating, he became the very first Hart Fellow, going to Rwanda with Save the Children as it was still reeling from a genocide that had devastated the country in 1995.

Sure, there were risks involved in his decisions. And certainly, they were not the same choices his pre-med, pre-law, pre-professional peers were making. But Damon remembers thinking, "This feels right. These are the kinds of things that I want to be doing. This is why I came to Duke."

He's followed the passion he developed at Duke for service with an international policy bent with senior-level positions in NATO, the National Security Council and now the Atlantic Council. Among his most influential positions has been serving as the Executive Secretary and Chief of Staff at the U.S. Embassy in Baghdad, where he played an instrumental role designing and implementing a surge in civilian outreach to compliment U.S. military counterinsurgency efforts.

Fifteen years ago, when Sonya Wu-Winter was recruited into a Hart Leadership class on "unaccompanied children in exile"-the predecessor of the Refugee Action Project and today's Service Opportunities in Leadership Program-she had no idea that she would spend the entirety of her professional career working with similar kinds of dislocated populations. The summer between her junior and senior year, she found herself on the coast of the Adriatic Sea in Croatia, working with refugees devastated by war.

"I really came wide open to whatever variety of experiences I would find at Duke and that's why I found it this lucky happenstance that I wandered into this class," she said. "I learned two important lessons that summer--how to drink Bosnian coffee and how to listen."

She's spent the rest of her career perfecting the art of listening, working with community organizations in the United States and Canada to provide services to refugee populations. Throughout her career, Sonya says, she's followed her intuition, taking one year at a time, recalibrating as needed. Currently, she serves on the Board of Directors for the Romero House, an organization that works with refugees in the Toronto area.

And then there's Mark Lorey, Damon's roommate at Duke. Mark was instinctively drawn to service, but it wasn't until he studied abroad in Malawi, where he witnessed first-hand communities and families ravaged by the emerging AIDS crisis, that he knew he wanted to build a career on those experiences. It was the moment of clarity that he had been waiting for.

"It was truly a turning point for me," Mark says. "I was able to open up and serve in a way that I hadn't been able to before."

After graduating, Lorey followed in his roommate's footsteps, becoming a Hart Fellow and returning to Malawi to continue his work in bolstering communities to deal with the AIDS pandemic. Today, he's the senior director of Integrated Program Effectiveness at World Vision International, a child-focused relief organization.

Listening to Sonya, Mark and Damon speak, to see their accomplishments in print, it's difficult not to be a little envious of the synergy that clearly exists between their passions and their careers. But it's also clear that getting there took courage, trust and a willingness to follow their instincts.

All three were trailblazers in a sense, seeking out service learning and civic engagement opportunities that were just beginning to materialize at the university, throwing themselves into theretofore uncharted territories with the guidance of programs like Hart Leadership. Today, programs like Hart and DukeEngage have taken flight and the opportunities are ample for students to engage in the same kind of guided explorations.

As for me, I always knew that a detailed 10-year plan was not necessarily involved in getting to where I want to be. I just needed to be reminded that clarity can only emerge after a bit of calculated risk-taking, after taking that brave leap into the unknown.

Embrace uncertainty, Mark, Sonya and Damon told me. Step outside your comfort zone. Find and follow your passion.

"So what are you doing after school?" It's still a question that I will inevitably get asked as I inch closer to graduation. But with the lessons I've learned from Mark, Sonya and Damon in mind, I am reassured that I don't need to have all the answers just yet.