If you’re like most people in college you’re feeling pretty lost right about now. The school year is coming to an end and it doesn’t matter what your major is or what year you are, it’s all getting too real. The clock is ticking and your time at UMass is dwindling down to the last grain of sand. Questions like: What am I going to be doing with my life? Will I be happy? Am I going to have to end up moving into my parents’ basement for the rest of my life? are flying through your head.
As a junior, I remember starting to freak out about the future the second I stepped onto campus during the Fall New Student Orientation. I wondered what clubs would be beneficial for my future and what people I should interact with in order to completely thrive in the four short years I had at UMass. I cared so much that I even broke up with my hometown boyfriend. In other words, I was crazy obsessed with my future and didn’t really appreciate the present moment I was living in.
It wasn’t until the end of my sophomore year that I realized that I didn’t care about my future. I didn’t care if what I was doing was impressive or if I’d get into graduate school with what I was a part of. I learned that it wasn’t what I was a part of that mattered, but what was a part of me. The experiences, people, adventures that I collected became much more dominant in how I started to understand my college life.
Throughout that whole process you learn to either really love your major or hate it; if you’re lucky you can add a major and keep up with the progress you’ve completed in your primary major. The point to all of this is that it’s okay to feel lost, or to feel like you don’t know where your place really is. Just do what you love. Be a writer if you want, produce music, become an instructor at the gym – we’re all so young and holding ourselves back from the potential to really grow and find out what can make us feel really at home with ourselves.
A lot of college grads complain about how after their undergrad careers were up, they felt lost. They did everything according to the book for four years and came out feeling more lost than when they came in to UMass as eighteen year olds.
So as the spring semester starts counting down, remember that your happiness and what YOU want means more than what your parents want or what society wants from you. We didn’t come to college for our MRS degrees and not all of us can be the future CEOs of the Forbes top 50 corporations. It’s okay to be lost, because when you feel like you’re the most lost, you are always found.