When I started at Oklahoma State University I thought I would get through my four years, enjoy my time, and be done and on to the professional world. After three years that isn’t quite how it has turned out.
Most of my friends are media majors like myself and they have started doing incredible things. Getting to travel for projects to the NFL combine or getting internship offers from minor league and summer league baseball teams to control their media relations or to be their play by play guy.
I, on the other hand, have been held up by a mixture of things but the largest factor was my inability to take things as seriously as I needed to. This lack of persistence has led to the realization that I will be at Oklahoma State a fifth year while many of my closest friends will be leaving after four.
That’s a scary thought. A large part of what makes college such an incredible experience is the friendships you make and the fact that all of your friends live within a few minutes of each other. I’m staying at OSU for the summer this year and I imagine I have a similar feeling now to what I will after next year, on a smaller scale.
I now live in a college town without the population of the college, which means it has become a very small town.
A couple of my friends are here with me this summer, but many have left for great opportunities. Once those friends left I got bored really fast. I still have my workout partner and one of my roommates around but seeing many of my friends go off to do awesome stuff just leaves me in my apartment wondering how I got so far behind.
I’ve had the thought for some time now that if I was at OSU for five years that’d just be an extra year of fun for me, but I realize now that it just means a year of seeing my friends move on while I get left behind.
I didn’t change majors, I wasn’t undecided coming into school. I just didn’t get my work done correctly, and that hurts. I’ll be at OSU a fifth year because of personal failings, not because I had to find myself or discover what I wanted to do. I just didn’t get it done.
I’m going into my fourth year at school knowing I’m still a junior even though my friends are all seniors now. And I’ll sit and watch next year when they walk across that stage at graduation knowing that I could have walked with them if I had been more dedicated in my sophomore and (first) junior years.
I’m undecided if I will walk when I do graduate later. What’s the point if I don’t get to celebrate with my friends? I’ll celebrate their graduations and I’ll know I have time left to put in at school.
If you’re an underclassman and you don’t know what you want to do yet, that’s totally fine. If it takes you a couple majors to figure out what you’re good at, that’s totally fine. But I’d suggest not goofing around for a year with important classes involved. You might just find that you’ll get left behind because of it.
