I read an article the other day directed at seniors getting ready to graduate college and man, this thing had me sucked in. I was hooked on this piece until one sentence where the author said, "Never again will life be this easy, this pretty, this effortless."
"Easy?!" I thought to myself. “How can she say that life in college is easy?!”
I'm stressing right now about three exams, two group projects, requirements for clubs, and I can’t even remember the last time I went to bed before 1 a.m. How can life get much more stressful or challenging?
After I spent a few minutes wondering how crazy that author must be to have said such a thing, I realized that maybe she did have a point. While busting our backs in college certainly is demanding and exhausting now, the difficulties and challenges of life will be very different later on from what they are now.
Life after college may not consist of cramming for final exams and writing papers until the sun comes up. However, we will have a billion different adult things to worry about like mortgages, marriages, our own kids, car loans and so many other real world things I don't even want to think about yet.
College is highly demanding and challenging but dang, college is such an awesome experience. There are few, if any, other work hard, play hard environments like this where we can passionately envelop ourselves in profound academic studies and then go out and make some spontaneous and crazy memories with our best friends. I’m going to miss the organizations I’ve become a part of, jumping and going crazy in the student section at football games, meeting so many new people every day, laughing with my roommates at 3 a.m. every weekend, and so much more from this time of our lives.
There’s no debating that college takes a lot of diligence and commitment, but what a fantastic time this is that we get to spend our days studying academics we’re passionate about and then spend our nights and weekends making new memories with our best friends.
The next chapter of our lives after college will be incredibly great, but it will also be incredibly different. If college has you stressed, take a deep breath and appreciate what we have while we have it because this time of our lives is such a unique, fantastic experience.
