College.
That wonderful time of our lives when we have so much time to focus on ourselves, try different things, meet new people and figure out what we will do in life from now on. Although all these new experiences and opportunities can be very exciting, other times they can get really overwhelming.
We may be far away from our childhood friends and family and their opinions about our lives, but we now find ourselves surrounded by professors and peers who can be equally opinionated about our lives and what we should do with it. With so many voices around us we can sometimes end up feeling a bit lost in this sea of the university life. But if we learn how to swim through these waters and choose wise the chances we take, we will certainly leave our university years behind with a better sense of who we are and what we want.
It’s important to remember that “finding yourself” is a life-long process. As the years go by, we change with them. Even if we may finish college feeling so sure about a career, maybe ten years down the road we will end up finding another job even better than the one we dream about now.
We need to leave room for change, because it’s an essential part of life. But we should take our college years serious because this is a once in a lifetime chance that we get to have so much time in our hands to really focus on figuring out what we want in life from now on.
The thing about finding yourself is that you first need to lose yourself a couple times or more. Changing majors, finding new friends to hang out with, breaking up a relationship, starting another relationship, getting a new job, quitting a job, choosing a bad internship and missing out on a great internship are all ways we may lose and find ourselves throughout our college years.
I changed majors, even though I was so certain about the first one and also studied in three different colleges (one that included a very pretty yet cold “white landscape” as seen in the photo, which is quite different from the view I now see around our gorgeous USF campus). So I’m quite familiar with the process of finding more of myself as changes come. Although I don’t think it’s a good idea to make big changes simply for the sake of doing so, when you find your heart heading toward a new direction, take some time to investigate if that new path seems to fit who you are better than where you are now. If you find out it does so, don’t be afraid to change directions and follow your heart!
I have heard many people talking about the college years as the “selfish years” that we get to only focus on finding yourselves and doing what we want. Although it is true that this is a great chance to find ourselves in life in a way we’ve perhaps never been able to do before, I believe being selfless can also be a way in which we find ourselves. Taking time to volunteer at an organization or going the extra mile to help a friend may open a lot of doors in our lives for jobs and relationships.
The best way I’ve found to describe the process of finding myself in my college years is a season of rearranging my priorities in life, goals, plans and dreams. We come to college with a baggage of expectations that have been put on us by others, and dreams we have dreamt for ourselves. Now is our chance to put them all out and rearrange them based on the people we are today and on whom we would like to become. Filled with difficult and uncertain, but also life-changing and really fun times, college serves as the best time for us to find more of ourselves and who we want to become one day.
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