Like many other students, I went to college the fall after I graduated high school. I was eighteen, had never lived on my own, never had a job, and never had to make any serious, adult decisions. While living at home all my decisions had either been made for me or strongly influenced by rules made by my parents or my school. When I got to college things were different. No one was around to look after me or make sure I was doing what I should be doing and honestly I didn't need anyone to do these things.

I knew why I had come to college and I knew how to pick up after myself and do my own laundry. I didn't have a stereotypical freshman year experience. I didn't party or drink all the time. I went to almost all of my classes and kept my grades up. But I did find out that what people said about college was true and that it really was a time of extreme self-discovery. What I discovered that was at eighteen I didn't have the slightest clue who I was or what I wanted. Most of my dreams and aspirations were ones that other people had created for me and I had simply accepted as my own.

While in high school I was a straight-A student who never went out if I could avoid it and because of this I believe people automatically assumed that I was the sort of studious person who enjoyed school and aspired to have as many college degrees as I could possibly get.

But I wasn't then and I'm not now. What enthusiasm I had for classes came from a general lack of enthusiasm for anything else and not a love for learning or goals I had set for myself like people have always appeared to think. This was something I didn't realize until I had been at college for an entire year and its something I still do not fully understand after almost two.

I can admit that when I graduated high school I didn't look forward to college for the college experience but rather the change in scenery and if we were living in an earlier decade when the college was not as necessary as it is now I don't know if I would have bothered with higher education.

I know without a doubt that I will finish school and get a degree because I'm determined not to give up on this one thing that is supposed to be most important to me at this point in my life but if I could go back in time to my senior year of high school knowing what I know now about myself and my lack of life experience I know that I would have taken the gap year I considered when I was sixteen but was talked out of my peers and teachers.

I would have ignored the expectation that college students are supposed to finish school by the age of twenty-two and then go on to have amazing jobs by their mid-twenties because as nice as that idea is it's not the reality for most people. At eighteen I didn't know enough about anything to decide what career path I wanted to take because I'd never worked a day in my life and never had to pay a single bill.

I had no real interests or passions and the things I did want from life were the things I had been taught in school that I was supposed to want. And for these reasons, I can say that I truly do regret going to college at eighteen because at twenty I'm finding that I don't know what I want to do with my life as much as I thought I did and that maybe the timeline that is supposed to work for everyone doesn't work for me. And, even though I am the type of person who always likes to have an idea of what I'm doing, I am finding that I am okay with figuring things out as I go.