My Fear That College Has Brought To Life

If you know me as a person, you know that I have to have a very detailed plan for everything I do in life. I don’t do things spontaneously because I always have to have a plan. I’m not exactly proud of this part of me; It can be quite annoying to my friends and family who don’t need every part of their day detailed, but it’s something that I’ve grown used to.

I’m about to start my second semester of college and I’m feeling much more confident in myself than I did at the start of my first semester. What I am not feeling confident about, is my plan for my future. As of right now I am a psychology major and plan on declaring a second major in sociology at the start of second semester, but for my actual future, as in what I want to do with my life, I have no freaking clue. That terrifies me. I need to have a plan. I have to have short term and long term goals to work at. ‘Going with the flow’ is not something I can do.

To sum up my plan, this was how it was supposed to go; Graduate high school, get into college, take all these awesome and interesting classes, do well in alll my classes, graduate as soon as possible from college, get a good enough job, work at that job for a while, find a better job in my field of expertise, work at a job I love doing, retire and then I can be spontaneous.

My fear that college has brought to life, is that I don’t have a plan for my future. I have no idea what I want to do with my life beyond the fact that I only want to get a bachelors degree at this time. And yes, I know that I still have plenty time before I have to really start worrying about what I want to do with my life, and yes I know that that this is what college is for; to educate me and to help point me in the direction of what I want to do with my life. Knowing all that does not help me from freaking out. I have to have a plan.

Without a plan, I tend to go crazy. I stress over every little detail of my life, I stress over things that are months, or even years away, but it’s something that I cannot help. I have gotten pretty good at pretending that I’m not freaking out about this minor detail that doesn’t fi into my plan, but on the inside, I’m a raging lunatic.

I know this isn’t very healthy, but for the sake of my sanity, it’s easier to just plan everything down to the detail, then allow my over obsessed mind to imagine everything that could go wrong.

So in summary, college has brought to life one very scary fear of mine; Not having a long term plan for my future. Just like every kid, growing up I wanted to be a hundred different things. I wanted to be a veterinarian, or a cop, or even a writer. None of those dreams seemed to work with my already existing plan. I was, and am, to big of a baby to ever put an animal down, I have the body of an eighty year old and would not be able to do anything but sit behind a desk, and I don’t think I am creative enough to write something that no one has read before. Nothing seemed to work, until I got to high school and realized that I actually do like helping people and giving advice, but a lot of jobs in the psychology and sociology world, like a psychologist or sociologist, you have to have atleast a master’s degree. Maybe when I have a few years of the work force under my belt will I go back for a higher degree, but in four years I don’t think I will have the energy or will to contuine my schooling any longer. So right now, it seems I am destined to flounder about, worrying about my future.

While I’m not completely clueless to what I want to do, I just have to many options. Some of them don’t have anything to do with my majors. While I may not have everything figured out just yet, I have a lot of tools to help me figure it out. I am lucky enough to have professors I can talk to about these fears and who can help me figure out what I want to do with my life. What I need to learn, is that not everything is set in stone and plans change.