Somebody said to me the other day, “Enjoy college. It will be the greatest four years of your life,” and at the time, I didn’t think much of it. Because college is great, right?

Don’t get me wrong. I love college. I love the freedom it gives me — I can go out at 2 a.m. and get tacos or eat ice cream for dinner and frozen pizza for breakfast (all of which I have done multiple times). I don’t have to ask permission, and I’m only accountable for me. College forces you to grow up. You can choose to go to class or not; for the first time in your life, your mom's not there to wake you up every morning and see you get on the school bus. You can go out and party, have people over whenever you want. Whatever you want to do, college gives you the freedom to do it. But as I began to think about the enormity of what that person said to me, I started to pray that these four-ish years aren’t the best of my life.

For one, there has to be more than crappy vodka and beer pong for me. Listen, I can play beer pong with the best of them. You begin to develop this routine. Go out, Thursday through Saturday night. Go to the same house, with the same people, or the same club with the same music week after week. It gets old. I want my life to be an adventure; I don’t want to do the same thing every day or every weekend. Perhaps it’s naïve to want more from my life and to hope for more than the mundane routine I’ve apparently settled into. To think that I may have possibly peaked at 20 is almost too depressing to think about. I’m not sure if I ever want to climb to my peak — I want to keep reaching for more, to keep getting better. To always say yes to new opportunities. My grandparents (who have had the most amazing life, lives I could only dream of living) once told me that the reason they had such incredible adventures and conquered their “peaks” was because they said yes to every opportunity and stepped into the fear. They lived in Iran in the seventies and traveled all over the Middle East. Experiencing things that we no longer can because they said yes. They never accepted the idea of the “peak.” They just lived their lives day by day. Never saying that they had already experienced the best years of their lives, they just said yes to every new opportunity and lived their lives to the fullest extent.

College is unbelievably stressful, exhausting, and all time consuming. Aside from a full class load, there is homework, maintaining a job, social responsibilities, and for some, college students athletics. The stress that this causes on most college students can cause mental and physical deterioration. It just seems never ending. You spend so much of your college life studying for classes that really have no use in your major, or that interest you. You have to take them to fulfill requirements and it becomes less about what you love to study and why you came to college and more about doing what you have to do to pass. Confucius once said, “Choose a job you love, and you’ll never work a day in your life”, and my college career so far feels like work. I don’t enjoy it. I just muddle through it. After all, I am paying thousands of dollars for this, so my main concern is getting through it. I tell myself over and over that the sleep deprivation and the stress will all be worth it. I am so eager to get out into the real world and start doing what I love that I drink copious amounts of coffee and red bull in an attempt to stay up all night to study for a class that after the final is over I’ll hopefully never think about again. I want a career and a life that inspires me. I want to come to work and absolutely love being there. I want to be so in love with my job and give everything I have to it.

I want to be able to say that my entire life was amazing. Not just one time period that I experienced in my twenties, so that when my future grandkids ask me stories about my life, I can tell them I took advantage of every opportunity and that my entire life was full of adventure, passion, and that I contributed something good to this world. Not just about the four years I spent at college but my entire life, the good and the bad. That’s why I pray that the four years I spend at college are not the best years of my life.