With the start of second semester and a new year, I expected to return to school feeling refreshed and rejuvenated. While I do feel excited about the coming months, I simultaneously feel plagued by worry over not doing or being enough. The beginning of this semester marks the start of worrying about internship applications, job prospects, and just the future in general. With my college experience being almost halfway over, I am beginning to seriously focus on “The Real World”.
One of the amazing things college offers is the opportunity to involve yourself in anything you desire. All kinds of clubs exist and if the one you’re looking for does not, you can just create it. However, the side effect of the ability to join any club is the pressure to join too many. At a school like Michigan, with 28,000 undergraduate students, there is a constant feeling of competition. Whether in a class or an extracurricular activity, there are always going to be so many people trying to accomplish the same things that you are. This evokes a feeling that one needs to be involved in as much as possible to give them an advantage. This can create positive or negative results. On one hand, it encourages students to involve themselves in things they are passionate about. However, it also creates feelings of inadequacy amongst students who do not feel like they are doing enough, even if they are.
I have been focusing on this a lot since returning to school because I myself am now facing the dilemma of how to best prepare myself for the future. Is it better to become involved in as many things as possible, or only a few things and invest more into those things? Is there anything that separates me from the hundreds or thousands of other students at Michigan and nationwide that want to do the same things that I do?
What I am beginning to realize is that I, and everyone else, can only do as much as I can handle, and as much that will make me happy. Involving oneself to the point where they have no time and they are not passionate about what they are doing will achieve nothing but set one back from their ultimate goals, because their heart will not be in it. What separates students from one another is their individuality and their personality- not if they are involved in 2 clubs or 9, but what they have learned from that involvement and how it has helped shape them.
The pressures that accompany growing up will follow me forever, and I am realizing that it happens again and again in life. I felt it when applying to colleges, I feel it now, and I’m sure I will feel it multiple times in “The Real World”. However, instead of becoming discouraged by it, I am trying to remind myself to embrace it; to use this pressure as motivation to pursue my passions and work hard, but not to succumb to it and as a result fail at the things I care about. While this is easier said than done, I think it is important to remember as I continue not just in my college career, but in my life in general.
Image courtesy of The Foothill Dragon Press.