There was a time when college was supposed to be about figuring things out. Taking classes, meeting people, changing your mind, joining a club because it sounded fun and maybe, somewhere along the way, discovering what you actually wanted to do with your life. Now, there is a different kind of pressure hanging over the college experience: experience. Not just good grades. Not just a degree. Experience. An internship before graduation, a leadership position on campus, volunteer work, a professional LinkedIn profile, networking events, certifications, projects and maybe even a side hustle.
If you have somehow managed to do all of that while maintaining a social life, getting enough sleep and remembering to eat lunch, congratulations – you might finally be considered “career-ready.” For college students, especially young women entering increasingly competitive job markets, the pressure to start building a career before actually graduating has become almost impossible to ignore.
The question is no longer simply, “What do you want to do after college?” It has quietly become, “What have you already done?”
WELCOME TO THE RACE
Scroll through LinkedIn for five minutes and it can feel like everyone your age is already ten steps ahead. Someone just landed an internship at a major company. Someone else was selected for a prestigious leadership program. Another person is studying abroad, launching a startup or announcing their fifth internship before their junior year. Even when we know social media is a highlight reel, comparison has a way of creeping in.
Suddenly, your summer job doesn’t feel like enough, your volunteer experience seems insignificant and your empty LinkedIn profile becomes something you are embarrassed about. That internship you didn’t get starts feeling less like one rejection and more like evidence that you’re falling behind. The strange part is that there is no official finish line. There is always another opportunity to chase: another internship, another connection, another certificate, another event, another bullet point to add to the résumé.
And because everyone seems to be running, standing still can feel like failure.
THE INTERNSHIP ISN’T JUST AN INTERNSHIP ANYMORE
Internships have become one of the most visible symbols of professional ambition during college. They offer students something classrooms often cannot: the opportunity to test their knowledge in the real world. But internships can also create a complicated paradox: students are told they need experience to get a job, yet many internships themselves ask for previous experience.
So you apply for an internship to gain experience, only to discover that the company wants someone who already has experience. Make it make sense. For some students, internships are also difficult to access because of financial realities. An unpaid or poorly paid opportunity might look fantastic on a résumé, but it can be impossible for someone who needs to work to support themselves or their family. That means the race for experience isn’t necessarily happening on an equal track.
Some students have the time and financial flexibility to accept an internship, attend networking events and build extracurricular portfolios, while others are balancing classes with paid work, commuting long distances or taking care of responsibilities outside the university. And yet, résumés rarely tell that story.
NETWORKING: MAKING FRIENDS, BUT PROFESSIONALLY
Then comes networking. The word itself can sound intimidating, bringing to mind crowded conferences, name tags and conversations that begin with, “So, what do you do?” But networking doesn’t necessarily have to look like that. Sometimes it is simply talking to a professor after class, asking someone about their career, connecting with a classmate on LinkedIn, sending a thoughtful message to someone whose work you admire or joining a student organization and actually talking to the people in it. In many ways, networking is less about collecting contacts and more about building relationships.
The problem is that when networking becomes another item on the college checklist, it can lose its humanity. Students can start treating every interaction as a potential opportunity: Could this person help me get an internship? Should I connect with them on LinkedIn? Could they introduce me to someone? It is exhausting to constantly wonder whether every conversation has professional value. Not every person you meet needs to become a connection, and not every friendship needs to become a networking opportunity. Sometimes, a conversation can simply be a conversation.
THE PRESSURE TO HAVE IT ALL FIGURED OUT
Behind the race for experience is something deeper: the fear of being left behind. College is often portrayed as the time when you’re supposed to discover who you are, but the modern college student is also expected to have a five-year plan.
Choose a major. Build a résumé. Find an internship. Develop a personal brand. Network. Graduate. Get a job. Preferably before everyone else. But careers rarely happen in such a straight line. People change majors, leave internships, discover new interests, realize that their dream job isn’t actually their dream, start over, fail and try something completely different. And those experiences matter too.
There is something particularly ironic about a period of life that is supposed to be about exploration becoming so focused on optimization. We are encouraged to make every semester count, every summer productive and every experience résumé-worthy. But what happens to the experiences that don’t look impressive on paper?
The late-night conversations with friends, the club you joined because you were curious, the class that changed the way you think, the spontaneous trip, the semester when you struggled but learned how to keep going or the professor who made you fall in love with a subject you never expected to care about. Those things may never become a bullet point on LinkedIn, but they are still part of becoming an adult.
MAYBE EXPERIENCE ISN’T JUST WHAT YOU CAN PUT ON A RÉSUMÉ
The irony of the experience race is that students can become so focused on proving that they are prepared for the future that they forget they are already living their lives. An internship can teach you how a workplace operates. Networking can introduce you to people who open unexpected doors. Extracurricular activities can help you discover skills you didn’t know you had. These things matter, but so does rest. So does curiosity. So does having a life outside of work.
There is no universal timeline for becoming successful. The person who gets their first internship at 19 isn’t necessarily ahead of the person who gets theirs at 22, and the student with five extracurricular activities isn’t automatically more prepared than the student who spent those years working a part-time job. Experience comes in different forms.
Some of it happens in offices, some of it happens in classrooms and some of it happens behind a counter at a part-time job, on a sports field, during a volunteer project or in a conversation with someone who completely changes your perspective.
Maybe the real challenge of the modern college experience isn’t learning how to win the race. Maybe it’s realizing that you don’t have to run someone else’s race in the first place. Because your twenties are not a résumé. They’re a beginning.
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The article above was edited by Sarah Pizarro.
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