Being in college does not just mean balancing a social life with studying—it’s deeper than that.
Being in college means that you are given a span of time, an average of four years, to unlock different facets of yourself that you’ve never known; it means that you have to figure out what you’re going to do for the rest of your life.
Personally, the hardest part of college for me wasn’t paying for school, it wasn’t trying to build my network for the future, but the hardest part so far has been finding and keeping motivation to continue through the stress of all the schoolwork, reading, and tests that piled up. And if you’re in a major that you don’t feel passionate about, that stress is even more evident.
Movies, adults, and television shows tell you that college is the time where you figure out who you really are, and that’s not a cliché.
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When you realize that your future job is basically you selling yourself through your time, labor, and talents, you’ll start to see that following your dreams has all that much more meaning—because what you do in college dictates your future and your life ahead of you.
If you’re not doing what you love, then you’ve spent a lot of time in school unhappy, and you’ll spend a lot of time in your future work unhappy.
For the lucky, they know what they want to do and are already studying it. For some, like me, it took a lot of convincing and planning to switch majors into what they really felt strongly about. And for others, they have no idea what in the world they want to do.
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To those people, I say not to worry too much.
Try new things, find more passions, cultivate and continue to put in effort for those passions, get out more with friends, take time to yourself to think, have fun, and most importantly: make sure that you are working for a future you can see yourself happy in. Eventually, who you are as a person will tell you what direction you should go in.
Bottom line, college is more than living in the present and having a good time and studying hard. College is the start of your future, and it’s up to you to make it a good one.