I was recently scrolling through my newsfeed and came across an article about why college won’t be the best four years of your life. As someone who has been really eager to graduate, the title grabbed me. And I’m really glad I read it. I strongly agree with what the author had to say; finally earning a degree is not the end of life as we know it but the beginning. If you think the four to five, maybe six, years you spend slaving away over school work, drinking with friends you may or may not keep, barely sleeping, being constantly broke, chasing guys who don’t know what they want, and having little time to do what you actually want to is fun, then more power to you.

Keep in mind the vast majority of us will hopefully live to be 70 or 80. If you peak at 21 or 22, what are you going to do with the sixty to seventy years remaining? Knit? Play Bingo? That doesn’t sound quite like the bright future I know we all want to have and be proud of. It more than likely isn’t what the kid version of you dreamed of doing either. Why settle?

That’s not to say there is anything wrong with any of the so called “fun stuff” we do in college, it’s all just a part of the college package. College is supposed to give you the necessary tools to go out into the adult world to live the life you want to your fullest potential. If you feel or even think you're at your strongest and most successful in college, then I challenge you to think about that. Think about where that degree could take you and what you want to do with your future. Those do exist after college; it's one of the main points the author made in her article: graduation is not the end of life as we know it, it's a gateway to the rest of our life.

Yea, college is fun. But it’s not all a big party. The author of the article said she wasn’t sure why people always told her college would be the best time of her life. I remember being pretty skeptical of that statement as a high school senior, too. Partying and all that jazz has never been my cup of tea, something the author and I have in common. When people would tell me stories about their glory days, I just couldn’t see myself enjoying that kind of thing. But I’ve had some fun times and made some great memories with friends I know will always have my back. However, college is more than just that party scene at the beginning of Legally Blonde.

"Don’t settle for the idea of just being another college student with a degree. "

We finally find ourselves in college; we figure out what future we see for ourselves, our honest likes and dislikes, and interests. I thought I never would but I finally did. We make friends and meet lots of people from different places. Some of the friends we make won’t be the people we think they are. But we do find some gems out there that will back us up and help us move forward when we just want to drop everything and run. Those are the friends to hold onto. Sometimes we meet people that inspire us to change the small semblance of a life blueprint we have and never look back.

We spend countless nights studying, wondering when the knowledge from the b.s. general ed classes will come in handy. We quickly learn how to operate on extremely small amounts of sleep, not to mention a usually nonexistent budget. We ask ourselves a thousand times why we’re doing this. Usually the answers to that just lead to more frustration, sometimes anger at America’s idea of an education system. College makes us doubt our abilities but it also shows us what we’re capable of doing, our strengths, even the hidden ones. Sometimes we surprise ourselves. College sucks a lot of the time but it’s just building character, at least that’s what our parents say.

Don’t settle for the idea of just being another college student with a degree. Use that degree or degrees to take the world by the horns and make it yours. Be successful. Whether you want to end world hunger, finally bring world peace, be president (Kanye West is planning on it, so it can’t be that bad of an idea), a rockstar, or simply to start a family, just go for it. We didn’t do all this work in college for nothing, right?

Graduating from college and moving into the real world is a huge transition to make; it’s just the next big thing, the next phase of life. Yes, it’s scary but so was coming to college. Sometimes the big-kid world distances us from our friends. If we’re lucky enough, we find the ones that are always just a phone call away. We’ll still be able to have all the fun we want, especially if we love the field we choose and are happy with ourselves. I know I’m ready to move on. College has been great and all but it’s time for a change. There’s a great world out there just waiting for us. Dive in and see what happens.