The amount of time I’ve heard “College is the best four years of your life” is endless. As a college student, you hear it over and over. It is drilled in your head that this is it. This is your prime. Everyone says these will be your best days of your life and I 100% completely disagree with that.
Don’t get me wrong, college is amazing. You enter a new world and endless doors of opportunity are offered to you. You have the time to explore on your own and make your first adult decisions. What they don’t tell you is the amount of stress and pressure that comes with college. There isn’t a day in college that you aren’t worried about something and as soon as you hit the upperclassmen mark, it gets real. You start to stress about what you are becoming and who you are going to be. You start to realize that getting a good job doesn’t come on a silver plate. You have to work your ass off and that’s when life starts to get real.
You quickly realize that spending your days drinking probably isn’t the best idea. You hopefully start to realize that there is so much more to life than spending four years in college getting drunk with random frat boys who don’t remember your name. These four years are actually a ladder to the rest of your life, and it’s important to utilize this time. I look forward to the days when I actually have my life together.
The days when you look around and realize you made it. Your hard work has paid off. Those are going to be the best days.
When you have enough money in your bank account to be able to go out and try new things and experience adventures, it will feel a thousand times better when it’s your own money, not your parent’s. Having your own money makes you appreciate things a lot more. You won’t have to worry about having enough money to fill your car up with gas. No longer being completely broke will be an amazing feeling.
It will be a good feeling when you have the responsibility of an adult job because that means that they see you as someone who can handle it. You are no longer looked down on as someone who isn’t experienced enough. You have your education and you are ready to kill it in the work world. Hopefully this means finding a job that you love, but that won’t always be the case at first. Finding a real job will help reassure you that the thousands of dollars you spent on a college education was well worth it.
After college, you will have the opportunity to decide where you want to work and spend the rest of your life. I look forward to process of finding a home and decorating it to make it MINE. This is something that we should all be looking forward to; being stable enough in your life to be able to make these kinds of decisions.
After college, you will be able to actually enjoy life. Hopefully you will have some sort of full time job but you won’t have to worry about the stress of homework and tests every week. We will finally be able to apply what we have learned to real life. We no longer will be judged off a letter grade; we will be able to show what we are capable of with actions and ideas.
A lot of college students stress about what post-college has in store for them. My advice is to enjoy college while you can, but also look forward to the next chapter in your life. That chapter is going to have something amazing in store for you as well. It’s not going to be boring like you think. You will continue to grow and experience new things just like you did when you first came to college.