Senior year makes you reflect on what you've accomplished in your college career. The classes, professors, peers, clubs and organizations, great choices, terrible choices, and everything in between all accumulates into one unique experience for each individual. If there's one thing that I've learned while putting my life into perspective this year, it's that college is mostly bullshit.
Yes, classes can be cool and informative. Yes, you can learn a lot from your professors. But how much of what you learn in the classroom directly relates to what you'll be doing for a living? Unless you're going to med school, probably not much. Do any internship, talk to any person in a company that you want to work for, and they'll all tell you the same thing – what you went through to earn your 4-year certificate to work is only 5% of what you need to do the job.
You need hard skills, which are things that directly translate into your performance as a worker. You need people skills, aka "well yes this person is certainly qualified to do the job, but am I going to enjoy being in an office with them for 40 hours per week or more?" Most importantly, however, I think you need patience.
College students are under so much pressure in the 18-25 age range to have our lives completely figured out. If we don't, then the older generation and even our peers like to frame us as failures. In reality, less than one percent of us know what we want to do for the rest of our lives and we try painting a picture on social media and construct great narratives in person to make it seem as if we know what we're doing. Why can't we emphasize patience as it is a powerful virtue?
We get so caught up in other's expectations of us that we forget that we are only in the first quarter of our lives, and we have the entire ball game to go (thanks @garyvee for that line). Why do people get so bent out of shape when we're not even at halftime? Patience is incredibly important to learn, both for your mental health and ability to perform. Most of what you learn to do your job will be learned while on the job, so stressing out about grades shouldn't be your top priority. Yes, making good grades is optimal, but employers will be more impressed with what you've managed to do aside from earning your grades in school.
Most of us at this age are going to be able to work until we are in our 70s easily (thanks to healthcare and technology). This means we have 40-50 really good years of production in us. It took the best basketball player of all time, Michael Jordan, seven years to win his first title. If Jordan was patient enough to go seven years being the greatest player, then you can stay patient for a few years to figure out what you love to do and become great at it. Four years in college is nothing in relation to your entire career, especially when the value of those four years doesn't come from your classes, but instead your connections.
Our greatest weakness in this generation is our lack of patience and perspective. It becomes a dangerous thing when we have a loaded resume, have ample skills, a great personality, awesome work ethic, but still think we are failures because we don't have a job or aren't entirely sure of where we're going with our lives. If you're that college student (and trust me, I was for a long time), finding your patient side and gaining that perspective on life will help you go a lot further than sweating the small stuff.
