When we were little, our favorite question to answer was, “What do you want to be when you grow up?” We were told that we could be whatever we wanted to be, if we put our mind to it; so we wanted to be astronauts, movie stars, and professional athletes. We wanted to be fire fighters, scientists, and presidents. Little did we know, that a decade later, when we would be the grown-ups that our favorite question referred to, we would have no idea what we wanted.
Now the question has turned into, “What are you going to do after you graduate?” And that question, well, let’s just say it’s a lot more loaded than it’s counterpart, especially for the college senior without a clear path into the arms of the future. Unfortunately, I fall into that category, and I know many of you do as well. So now, here we are, twenty-one or twenty-two years old with thirteen years of school and four years of a higher education under our belts and all we can think is, what will we have to show for it?
We can picture the rest of our senior year. We will stress about tests, we will stress about relationships and we will party with our friends. We can picture graduation day too; we’ll throw our caps up in the air and we’ll cry for what we are leaving behind and smile at the gorgeous memories college has blessed us with. We can picture all of that. And then, we see nothing.
Post-college is like a black pit of uncertainty that we are getting closer and closer to every single moment. We are doomed to a surge of jealousy every time we hear about or see somebody who knows what they are doing after this year, or even knows what they want to do. For us, the college seniors who don’t have a plan, the future is frightening. How can we go out into the real world to follow our dreams if we don’t even know what they are yet?
This anxiety that we get every time somebody asks us the fatal question, “What are you going to do after college?” isn’t going to disappear, but there are things we can do to make it easier on ourselves. First of all, if we are standing here today, it means that we have overcome every challenge that has come our way, and although it may be our biggest challenge yet, we will overcome this one too. Second, we can look around us and understand that (literally) nobody knows what the future holds, even if they seem like they do. We are all in the same boat here, and all we can do is be the best version of ourselves every day, and one day we will get to where we need to be. Third of all, and this is extremely important, we have more time to figure it all out than we think. There is no rush in getting to the future. Who says you need a straight path? Aren’t the twists and turns what make life so interesting and so worth living? Fourth, we can look inside ourselves and find our passions, the things that make us happy. Then, we can take those passions and turn them into goals. Then we can take those goals and turn them into realities. The process will be long and grueling, but it will be worth it. One day, we will look back to when we were college seniors thinking that we had nowhere to go, and we will think how very wrong we were. We will think about how the world had always been our oyster; from the day somebody first asked us what we wanted to be when we grew up, to the day we actually figured it out.
