As the summer of junior year fades into the distant memories of late nights with home friends, a new feeling begins to overcome you. This feeling has been around for all of college up until now, but before, you had successfully ignored it. You continually told yourself that you were on the right path for your planned career and that everything would figure itself out eventually. But, as soon as the word “senior” got put on your Banner page, your whole life filled with panic. It’s like having a bunch of fruit flies in your kitchen; one day you see one or two and don’t think anything of it and then all of sudden you have a million. After placing tiny cups of apple cider vinegar around for weeks to no avail, you finally see the source of the problem: that old banana peel that you forgot was stuck in your garbage disposal. That banana peel is your future, and the fruit flies surrounding it are panic.
Now, if you are a senior and have a job waiting for you right after college and have never a seen a fruit fly in your life, more power to you. But this one goes out to all those people who thought they had a plan (sorta, kinda, maybe), and the day senior year started, their kitchen was infested with fruit flies. Just know you are not alone. It’s the age-old tale of fearing the unknown. Seniors are slapped in the face with it every time someone asks them what the plan is. Before senior year, being asked this also brought up great amounts of panic, but we all toned it down by reminding ourselves that we had a couple more years to figure it out. Now, however, there is no more time. At the end of this year, we will have to face the choices of our college years full on and accept it at face value, for better or for worse.
After reflecting on this topic for a couple days, I came to the conclusion that there has to be a way to deal with all the panic we are feeling. And like everything else, there probably isn’t a simple answer. There are a couple things that I came up with that I believe to be important. You need to trust yourself. You need to trust your ability to be successful and believe you deserve success. Repeat that last sentence. And again. Mix that in with a lot of hard work towards your goals. That’s about all you can do to face the future. It is okay to fail, take wrong turns, and even change your mind about your career this far deep into your Plan A. I promise, the sun will rise again tomorrow. Here’s to the class of 2020, and all of the seniors to come.