When we were younger we simply couldn’t wait to grow up and experience all of the things life has to offer. We couldn’t wait to drive, to get into the club on friday night, to go off to college and to have our first legal drink. Now even though we’ve made some great accomplishments over the years, the only thing we want right now is to be young again. It seems that we were in such a rush to grow up but now that we are expected to do adult things we never really took the time to grow up.
Now it’s senior year and our whole entire life is ahead of us. I’m sure we can all agree that we have worked so hard to get here and all of our goals are right outside of our reach. Just this past week, as my friends and I walked into happy hour in our cute fall sweaters and adorable booties, I rememembered all of the college students I would see when I was in high school. I always wondered how their curls could fall just right and how I would ever look so grown up. As I looked around I realized that even though we might look like we have it all together, we’re actually just trying to make it through some of these quarter-life crises.
Younger people come to you for advice.
You love that your little or your best friends little sister feel comfortable asking you for help and you really are flattered that they think you might have all the answers but honestly you needed your own pep talk just to get out of bed this morning so you really can’t be responsible for giving advice to another person.
It takes atleast 24 hours for you to cure a hangover.
What happened to the days when you could drink all night, wake up, eat a BLT, and start drinking again? Now you have to strategically plan which days you will go out just to make sure that your hangover the next day won’t interfere with something important.
There’s pressure to go out while you’re still young and hip.
Even though you know your liver probably needs a vacation, you can’t help but think about how your crazy college days are coming to an end sooner than you hoped and you want to take advantage of the fun before its too late to make memories.
Your friends are doing grown up things.
Whether your BFF that graduated last year just moved to the city to work or the couple you went to high school with just got engaged, life got real this year for a bunch of your peers.
You need a plan for the future.
Unless you’re some kind of masochist that enjoys knowing you might fail at life, there honestly is no time like the present to start making a plan for what you will do next.
There are only a few more months to hang with your roomies.
Over the past years you have met some people that will stay in your life forever and even though you know you won’t ever have to live without them, it’s hard to believe that your school fam will only be together for a short time longer.
You seriously might be the one living at home with your parents.
It’s fun to joke about sleeping on your parents couch for the rest of your life but now that the time has come to actually make arrangements to live without them for the rest of your life, you seriously don’t think it’s a bad idea after all.
The job world seems optimistic until you talk to recent grads that are still looking.
If you have watched the news or read a headline in the recent years, it appears that the economy has made some strides towards recovery. This all sounds pretty great until you think about the bleak reality of the potential jobs that are available and all of the other graduates that will be competing to fill those same positions.
Loans can’t even be on your mind because your bar tabs are already destroying your bank account.
If you really want to ruin your day, take a second to think about how its already been about 6 months since the class of 2015 walked across the stage at Commencement which means that their first student loan bill will be floating into their mailboxes any day now.
People in your classes have jobs lined up but when will you start applying?
You really wish your professors didn’t ask your senior capstone class who already has a job waiting for them and even worse, you really wish you could unsee the amount of people that raised their hands. Did you miss some event where companies were handing out jobs infront of the union or something?
You realize that LinkedIn connections might be more important than Instagram likes.
Up until recently, you always had a LinkedIn account but you never hontestly knew what was the point. Now that you’ve been messaged by sales recruiters at least 4 times, you begin to realize that LinkedIn might just be a serious resource.
You still don’t know if you should be going to grad school or not.
You hear all of your friends talking about their applications and their GRE or GMAT scores but how do you know if grad school is right for you? Apparently the four years of undergrad mean nothing to the real world but what if you go to grad school and end up just being overeducated and underemployed?