Society has bred students to be well-rounded. In order to be considered a competitive candidate for college, they must have decent grades, and they must do sports and clubs. The combination of a high GPA and multiple extracurriculars has become the standard requirement for students. However, my question is this: does this cause issues when they approach graduation?

Are employers looking for jacks-of-all-trades, as students are trained to be, or are they looking for someone that specialized for a long period of time? How does trying to specialize affect those who only know how to participate in everything, as much as their mental and physical capacity can handle? All of a sudden, they're forced to focus on one thing, and one thing early. So is focus the underlying issue here? Do students nowadays have less focus? But they were raised to do it all. With all these questions I have, the only answer I can really give is drawn from my own experience.

My dad told me recently that I was pretty good at playing the piano until I let it go for college. I spent the first 18 years of my life with my fingers on keys. But in college, it was time to settle down and focus on doing something to get me a "real career." If I spent time trying to do music, I had less of a chance at being the best in healthcare.

It took my dad 4.5 years to tell me that if I had stuck with piano, I would have surpassed "pretty good" and become "phenomenal." He's right. I was wrong to think I had to sacrifice one activity to be good at something else. I was raised to be well-rounded, which means in hind-sight, the thing I was missing in college was the music.

Music and entertainment always came naturally to me. But because they were so common in my childhood, I thought I had to do so much more than those talents, because "school is important" and "sports are important" and "community service is important." All those were important, but that didn't mean I had to sell myself short. I thought every person had my foolish childhood dreams, so when a door opened, I closed it. I didn't realize I was allowed to keep those dreams.

I'm reaching the end of my college career and through all these years I still find myself digging heavily into jobs and activities that aren't specific to my major, while everyone else goes the typical science route. People say "work smarter, not harder," and working smarter for me keeps leading me into some sort of entertainment and customer service-based activity, because that's what comes naturally to me.

I want to help people, and be inspired by each person's story, and I just don't get that from my studies. If I'm a creative person, I want to use that to interpret my degree to how I find it best fits me. I want to study integrative, holistic health to help others find emotional well-being when they've gone through similar things that I've had. I want to pursue performing arts. I want to own a business. And I'll do it all. that's the well-rounded child in me.

Yeah, sometime's it's hard being the well-rounded kid when society wants to push you in one direction. If society suggests you do something you're supposed to do and it's not right for you, f**k the suggestion. It's up to you to make your own path when you've got important ideas. Maybe it's time for society to be well-rounded too.