Freshman year, I made a decision that, at the time, seemed to set me up for success. The second month of school, I walked into my advisor’s office and created a plan to graduate a year early. I am both a neuroscience major and a pre-med student, so it took a lot of creativity and time, but we were able to set me up for success. I was ecstatic to be graduating in three years instead of four. In fact, I was so sure of my decision to graduate early, that I never thought twice about it. That is, until the pandemic.
When the pandemic took away half of my second year at school, it hurt a little bit more for me than the rest of my friends. Now, I realized, I would only be spending 2.5 years on my college campus instead of the four years that most people spend. However, I just figured that I would make the most of it. I thought I would have a fun final year when I returned in the fall. I would make sure to solidify my relationships with advisors and professors, so I could secure letters of recommendation for medical school. I would work hard to fill up my time with meaningful ways to improve my resume and get experience before graduating.
Suffice to say, that didn’t happen. All of my classes in the fall were online, so I lived off campus. Seeing friends? Didn’t happen. Having meaningful classroom experiences besides just turning in assignments? Didn’t happen. Solidifying relationships with advisors and faculty? Nope. Extracurriculars? Nope. It’s not that I didn’t try, but there was something about online school that made it so impossible to feel connected.
So here I am, less than a semester away from graduating, and I am floundering. All of my volunteer programs and internships this semester have been cancelled, I barely see my friends, and I feel like the one and a half years I spent at college prior to the pandemic were not nearly enough to prepare me for the real world. Ever since I started college, I had planned to spend my gap year doing what I wanted to do. I was going to get a part-time job, save up money, and travel because I knew that once I started medical school, travel would not be feasible. If that didn’t work out, I was going to do something else. Regardless, I knew I wanted to explore something new and exciting during my gap year and be ready and excited for when medical school came around.
Now, however, I have no clue what to do. I definitely do not have enough experience to take my gap year as easily as I wanted to. Since all my internships were cancelled, I no longer have enough shadowing experience. Since the pandemic cancelled my long-term volunteer position I had just finished training for, I have very little volunteering experience.
I am not complaining about having to spend my gap year working and volunteering at all. I understand I was privileged that I might not have had to before my gap year. The problem is, I have no clue where to start. I don’t know where I want to live, work, or what I want to do. Applying for jobs right now seems impossible because everyone is thinking the same things I am. No one wants to go from online undergraduate school to online graduate school, and so every single person is looking for a job right now. Not only that, but so many places, especially the medical field, are extremely restrictive on what positions are needed.
On top of all of this, and most importantly, I, like many other seniors, simply do not feel ready to leave college. I feel like I haven’t experienced enough yet, or met enough faculty, or simply enjoyed my time in school enough. I know I am in the same boat of so many graduating students. We’ve missed out on so much in such a pivotal point in our lives. In many ways, graduating during the pandemic feels impossible. Somehow, in the middle of the most lonely and confined point in our entire lives, we have to prepare to move away from the lives we’ve lived for the past few years.
I think it’s so vital to remember that pretty much every senior, regardless of their situation or career path, is feeling the same thing. No one feels ready, and everyone feels like they’re having experiences and internships and memories stripped away from them. It’s overwhelming. It’s terrifying. But for me, being thrown out to sea like this had made me reevaluate how I look back on the little moments I forgot to cherish. It has made me realize that in a campus culture that puts so much emphasis on high achieving, it was never the classes or studying until 2:00 am that made me happy. Rather, it was the moments in between. It was the late nights in dorm rooms, walks around the Furman lake, and late night Cookout runs that made college worth it.
So, as we try and get through these last few months of college, and prepare for whatever is ahead, we have to remember that not knowing is okay. If there is one thing I’ve learned from college, it’s that no matter what, things work out in the end. And, if it doesn’t, you can always blame the literal pandemic that is going on.