Back in the summer of 2016, once it was official that I would be attending UNCW, my parents sat me down one night and told me that I needed to plan out what courses I was going to take. This made sense because you have to decide what to take the first semester, but my parents went a step further. I didn’t just plan out my first semester, I planned out all four years of college classes. I spent several days going through all of the classes required for my major. I figurred out what their prerequisites were or if they were corequisites and the sequencing necessary to land those prereqs and set up all of the classes appropriately. Once I had access to the university studies catalog and all the classes I would have to take in those sections, I jotted down where those classes would fit into my schedule. I had planned my senior year classes within the first week of my freshman year.
Now, this plan wasn’t set in stone, especially if I couldn’t get into certain classes or if the class double-counted. Over the course of the semesters, the plan was intentionally flexible enough that I could shuffle things around, but for the most part, I always stuck to this plan. Whenever registration time came around, I was that student that would go into my advisor’s office with all of my first choice classes and backups already planned out. I would breeze in and out with my registration pin, no problem. Even when I planned to study abroad, before I ever committed, I double-checked my plan with my degree requirements to make sure that the classes counted toward my major. For four years, I’ve had a master plan that’s dictated my life and now there are no more classes to schedule.
There was another aspect of planning my college years that didn’t involve classes. The plan was that during my summers, I would work at internships relevant to my degree and my future career field. This meant that I would spend my fall semesters applying to internships and interviewing for them. In the spring, I would send in paperwork or coordinating housing if the internship was out of state, and summers were spent actually working at the internship. The only exception was when I spent one summer attending a study abroad program. This was to fulfill part of the whole college plan that went without saying between me and my parents. At the end of college, I would find a job and start work full time.
Now begins the plan for the next two years of my life. First was finding a job, which I can thankfully say has been a success and I couldn’t be happier with how things turned out in that regard. The second was figuring out where to live after finding a job. I also have that sorted out as my family lives close to where I’ll be working. From there comes a big life-changing factor of finding a place to live on my own. Once I’ve found the place I want to live, there will be a time of adjustment as I establish a new routine. Pretty soon after getting a place of my own, my personal goal of adopting my own pet comes into play. Now this seems kind of simple, like everything should be fine, but even with all of these plans and knowing exactly where my life is going and having a clear trajectory to shoot for, I’m still lost.
For so many years, my life has been dictated by a master plan of steps to complete this chapter of my life, and the chapter I’m entering doesn’t have such a strict plan. The next part of my life is going to be about spontaneity, which is the one thing I’ve never been good at. For instance, I will have to decide when I go on vacation and what to do with the time I don’t spend on my career. Going on a journey with myself and figuring out my purpose in life is going to be the greatest leap of faith I take, as well as figuring out how to use the precious time I have to make a difference in the world and enjoy every day that I have. These are things that will take time to figure out, and so starting out I won’t know what I want to do, and I have to accept that it’s okay. It’s okay to have parts of your life completely figured out and to be completely lost in other parts of it.