I love college, don’t get me wrong, but I really doubt these are the best years of my life. If you think about your life as a timeline, your college years are equal to your toddler years of adulthood. You spend this time trying to make the best of being young while you still can while taking the steps to set up the rest of your life, which is incredibly stressful. It’s a weird time trying to figure out who you are as a person and how you will live the rest of your life.
I have been trying to figure out a mix of living in the now while remembering the past and working toward the future, and it’s hard. This article is the rambling of a confused 21-year-old grappling with the idea of graduating next year.
Change is also hard. You go from high school where you go back to a structured schedule and multiple clubs every day with little overlap, whereas with college everything is going almost all at once, so you have to pick and choose. Only having one class a day makes skipping easier, and working on an awkward part-time schedule can make working and finding jobs difficult. With my busy schedule with classes that span awkwardly in the day some days, I can only go to work for an hour. This normally is not a problem and I could totally find a new job, but the one I have now is the most flexible so it’s hard to change to one that might pay better. It is a little annoying that some internships do not get paid and some do. As a special education major, I fully feel we should get paid, at least during our senior year. We work the full 7-2 of 8-3 and do the full job as a teacher with no compensation, and in some states, you can not get a job outside of their internship. I feel like this is horrible, but that is a soap box I will get on another day. I will miss the students I am with dearly.
Relationships are also weird. You make friends and lose friends, but start to develop a group that you never want to let go of. Sure there are fights and times when you hate each other, we’re human, but realizing you care more about the person than the fight is important. The friends I have made here are ones that I want to keep. This group of people makes me feel like I am worth spending time with and are there whenever. One of my main goals is to love and support them as much as they love and support me. Dating Relationships though are weird. You think you meet the one and it’s over in an instant. You try to find the one using dating apps but end up finding creeps and slowly killing you inter-romantic. You chase after partners with no clue how they feel and you fall and you get up again. There is so much pressure to find something lasting but it’s hard. Your heart will be broken, but it will be useful.
I also feel like I am doing everything all at once but not doing anything at all. I see some of my friends going to conferences and doing everything they can to advance their careers and apart of a million organizations. I feel like I need to do a lot more than I am already doing, until I reflect. I am in four orgs (two of which I am on exec) on top of a job and classes. I normally have a jammed packed schedule (with dedicated friend time of course) and I have been on the deans list a majority of my time here. Yet looking at how others are succeeding hurts my ego a bit. I need to realize that almost everyone in college is slowly drowning or trying to figure it out themselves, and I am not alone.
I feel like while college is a shaping experience and I am tearing up thinking about graduating, it is really just a starting point. After college, you get the big boy job you have been training for all these years and you get the income to hopefully live your life the way you want it. You are fully free, which is terrifying and magical at the same time. It is like the leap from high school to college though, scary but with time you figure it out. You slowly gain the freedom to be who you want, with people you find that care about you as you make your own community. You trip, you fall, you love, you cry, and you stay up until 4 doing homework and crying into your ramen, but I would not trade this for the world. College is the screaming Taylor Swift with friends on the way back from Wendys’ or Walmart with the windows down, breaking down into a friend’s shoulder after a 2-year breakup, joining a sorority and getting on exec, squish hunting, Dunkin/starbies runs, going to field and meeting some cool kids, drinking with friends while dying hair and watching women powered movies. And I wouldn’t trade it for the world. Now I know a lot of this might not have made sense, but it was sort of therapeutic to type out. Our queen Taylor swift says it best in “You’re on your own kid”:
‘Cause there were pages turned with the bridges burned
Everything you lose is a step you take
So make the friendship bracelets
Take the moment and taste it
You’ve got no reason to be afraid
You’re on your own, kid
Yeah, you can face this
You’re on your own, kid
You always have been.
We can do this. We can navigate these weird years, and we will only use these to build and bloom into our jobs and future families. You may be on your own kid, but that is the fun part.