For years, I have heard people around me preaching about how my university years would be some of the best years of my life. For that reason, I always looked forward to them and had such high expectations for this period of my life. I expected that when I got to university, I would have a huge group of friends, go to crazy parties every single weekend and meet an incredible boyfriend. I would love my degree, have perfect grades and life would be everything that it wasn’t in high school.
Now let me tell you – I am a second-year mechanical engineering student and university is not what I expected it to look like. While so many great things have happened to me, the positives were accompanied by hardships and struggles that I never would have been able to foresee.
The first semester of my second year was probably the most challenging semester for me thus far. It was the biggest change that I had ever experienced – from moving out of my childhood house, moving across the country away from all my friends and family and having my first in-person university semester. It was a lot of new beginnings for me; along with many others in the same boat.
I had a hard time adjusting to my new life and often cried about how much I missed home and wished for life to be as simple as it seemed before.
Something that they don’t tell you about university is that it’s okay not to have everything figured out and chances are that most people don’t. At first, I was so critical of myself and felt that I had no purpose, just because I didn’t know exactly what I wanted to do with my life. Spoiler alert: it’s okay to not have your entire life planned out by the time you are 19. If you do know what you want to do with your life, that’s great, and you should feel very lucky to have that figured out. However, if you don’t, that is more than okay. There is lots of time to figure those things out. Besides, chances are, you will not want the same things in life when you are 19 compared to when you are in your 30s.
If once I graduate from engineering, I decide that I want to take a different route than engineering, by no means would that mean that I wasted time. I still learned lots, made lifelong friends, created memories to last a lifetime. And hey, I get to say that I got a Bachelor of Engineering, which is pretty amazing.
You may feel that your life has no clear direction right now and are struggling to envision the pieces fitting together. Just know that one day, all of the puzzle pieces will fit together. No one is completely certain of their future, as the future is always changing and we do not know the people that we’ll evolve into when the time comes.
I heard a quote three years ago. It is so simple, only three words, yet it is so powerful and it is what I tell myself when I’m feeling stressed out about life: “Trust the process.”
Just remember – all of the prior events and moments in your life had to work out for you to get to where you are today, so why wouldn’t they work out again, to get your future self to where you need to be?
You will graduate. You will fall in love. You will get that dream job. You will find your passion. You will travel. You will be happy. You will make your life whatever you want it to be! Don’t waste the present stressing about the future.
Trust the process.