Life during the lockdown was definitely not pleasant but neither are the hectic offline schedules since the reopening of colleges. A DU student’s day starts around 7 AM. But if you are a day scholar, it can get as bad as starting your day at 5 AM. It’s not that scary when you first join college with all the hustle-bustle around. A major shock ensues when your chosen course, no matter how much you love it, makes you fall flat at least once.
Initially, you try to make your college life happening or interesting by either trying to stumble upon the right people or finding no one at all. However, while swamped with assignments, internships, building connections on LinkedIn, working in societies, and filling a gazillion forms, it’s cold coffee that often comes to the rescue.
What makes college life a challenge is the confusion in and around you. Almost everyone is taking part in some activity, and FOMO becomes inevitable when you don’t get indulged in any extracurriculars, unlike others.
At one point, you begin to feel as if nothing is sorted, even if you get into the best college because the future is uncertain and we are forced to live with it. It eventually becomes all about your CV — internships for CV, skills for CV, designations for CV!
So, what’s the coping mechanism? Well, it’s nothing except you.
First, learn the skills you have always wished to learn because there’s a high possibility of you being exceptionally talented at them. Learning to code or digital marketing doesn’t help if you do it just for the sake of fitting into certain parameters. Look inside and find what you’d like to be and start from there and not from where others are starting.
It’s ambiguously stated so many times that you should improve your communication skills, but it’s equally important to know why you should do so because writing messages and e-mails as well as interacting in person are vital for growing your network. The focus should be on developing your personality rather than needlessly enlarging it.
Your undergrad is all about exploring and deciding what you would do in these three or four years since you are in a higher grade than your +2 when everything was more or less quite fixed or rather more predictable than now. In college, you’d see peers getting placed, going abroad for higher studies, and hustling, which is new to basically everyone, as school often keeps us in our comfort zone.
Having a clear direction for your future does make college a tad bit enjoyable. You don’t need to know what the whole staircase looks like, but you can at least figure out the next step. As much as college presents challenges, it offers countless opportunities as well, so we shouldn’t let the downsides discourage us.