Learning to adapt at a four-year university can be challenging. Wanting to do well in your classes, while finding what you want to do for the rest of your life is overwhelming. Most of us go to college to fulfill a requirement. A lot of the fields we want to get into require a college degree, so we work towards that.
The problem is, it’s so easy to lose yourself in the process.
I was talking to my friend Mya, and we were discussing how scared we are to graduate from college. To think that we won’t have any more campus events to go to, no theater club meetings, and no meeting up with our friends after class to sit down and lay in the yard, is crazy. I think the reason why we’re worried about graduating is that we’ve realized that we have no real identity outside of school. We’ve been in college for a couple of years now and we’ve gotten used to doing things that involve the school in some way. Now it’s like, when we move back home or go to grad school, what’s next for us?
We 100% know what we want to do after we graduate. We have it all planned out, we know what we want to do for the rest of our lives, where we want to work, and everything. However, we don’t have a “thing” that we enjoy doing in our free time. That sounds bizarre, but it’s true. We know what we like or want to do, that’s fun, but we never follow through with our plans. Now schools are about to end and we’re going into a new chapter in our lives without knowing who we are as people.
We’ve spent so much time trying to be successful in school that, even when we have breaks, we don’t know what to do with ourselves. Now we’re going to be spending this summer on a journey to learn more about ourselves outside of school. I think it’s important to take time for yourself, even if it’s just for a small amount of time. Your 20s are the years you are supposed to experiment, try new things, and meet new people. We should be using this time to become the people we want to be. That’s something we can do overnight; it’s just a matter of whether you are going to follow through or not.