As college seniors approach the end of their last fall semester, anxiety about impending graduation begins to set in. For a while I successfully avoided addressing my future, and spent the first crisp fall months in blissful ignorance, casually perusing the career services website and making notes of jobs I would “apply for later”. There was an air of possibility and confidence around my entire class, and if anyone was afraid no one admitted it. I soaked in the assurance of my peers with my head in the clouds, and it wasn’t until the last leaves fell from the trees outside Richardson that my haze began to thin.
Spending four years on an island in the Adirondack's has two very contradictory effects. Without the distractions of an urban environment you become sheltered, aware of the outside world but unaffected by its problems. The most formative years of your life occur across 1,100 acres, yet it seems like so, so much more. Every patch of grass is associated with a memory, and even though you’ve sat in the library hundreds of times there are still nooks and crannies that have yet to be explored. Everybody is a familiar face, wether it be a professor you had once, or a classmate you’ve never gotten to know but still wave too when they walk past. The field of competition is small, and accomplishments are accepted modestly. With seclusion comes focus, and though we are students it's easy to forget one day we wont be. Even when we have explored every last inch of this campus, there is so much out in the real world that has yet to be discovered. It's easy to lose sight of that.
Thinking about life outside the SLU bubble for me required a dual conversation: thinking about what I wanted to do, as well as who I wanted to be. A lot of growth can occur in the four short years we live here, but I realized I needed to understand where I stood in the present in order to see where I wanted to go. The temperature outside has dropped and all the leaves have fallen, but it still seems too soon to be making a decision about my future. The more time I spend around my classmates, who are slowly beginning to accept their fate, the more I began to realize I just wasn’t ready to join the “real world”. At first, I was embarrassed to even be thinking about taking a post-grad year, feeling ashamed as my friends filled out resumes and made travel plans for interviews. After all, I had always pitted the graduates who constantly talked about how much they missed St. Lawrence. Of course we would all miss college, but isn’t there something more meaningful in a life you build for yourself? I didn’t want to fall into a post-grad depression, but I also understood that I wasn’t ready to enter the 9-to-5 world, and these conflicting feelings built up until I could no longer remain in my cloud of avoidance.
The moment I accepted my fate, acknowledged I had to graduate and welcomed it with open arms, was the moment I understood what I needed. I think it's easy to get caught up in what we think are the “right” choices. The bubble we live in doesn’t just apply to our surroundings, it affects our mindsets as well. We all entered as high school students who didn’t know what we wanted for a career, all we knew is we had to go to college to have a career. Then from there we picked majors, minors, joined clubs and organizations, and by the time we marched into senior year we had all but forgotten to stop and ask ourselves if this is what we really want. Just as it is important to remember that we are all students, we are also individuals, and we don’t always have to make the same choices. I don't quite know what I want to do yet, but I know I need something different- the rest I'll figure out as I go along.
