College. In my sophomore brain, college is not something that stands in the front lines. Behind sports, friends, family and MTV reality shows, college looms somewhere in the shadows, reluctant to show its face to me.
But most of my peers can’t relate. For years, I’ve heard words like “college,” “future,” and “career” thrown at me and others during holidays parties and family birthdays. While everyone else seems to reply excitedly about their future alma matters, all I could manage was a mumble and an excuse to use the restroom.
As the year moves on and junior year rapidly approaches, college seems to be creeping into everyone’s daily thoughts and conversations, and I’m finding it harder to avoid the questions. So instead, I started listening to the answers, hoping that someone else’s plan would help me formulate mine.
I have listened to my friend’s conversations and strangers passing comments in the hallway, but even though the voices and faces kept changing, I found that the conversation wasn’t. All I heard about were four year colleges right after high school, no gap years, no community college transfer plans, no “year spent abroad” ideas.
I’ve quickly learned that while college talk is growing more common, it is growing no more diverse. The formula is: Work hard, play varsity sports, volunteer, and exhaust yourself, all while getting no closer to figuring out what you actually want to do with your life.
By no means am I bashing on people who are dead set on going to a college they’ve been dreaming about since they were five. But what happened to everyone else? What happened to every other student who doesn’t know what they want to be when they grow up, where they want to go to college, or even if they want to go to college or not?
It’s not possible for everyone to already know what they want to do, and it’s most certainly not possible for teenagers to just disappear into the woodwork, so there has to be just one answer. While still trying to figure out who they are and what they want, students are simply putting on a brave face and committing to what they know as the only way to grow up, translated by most as, going to college and graduating.
But growing up doesn’t mean you have to go to college and becoming an adult doesn’t mean sitting through four years of classes that you will hate just to get a job that you’ll hate even more come a few years. Growing up means finding yourself and staying true to that person. So why are there so many people so convinced this is the only way to make it? That getting into a great college and graduating with a degree is the only way to avoid living out of a trailer, when it’s not?
Some would blame parents who are too nosey, too involved with their childrens education and future to let them make their own decisions. Some would blame teachers and counselors who push students to take AP and Honors courses to get a taste of what college will be like. I blame myself for taking classes I knew I wouldn’t like just to have a good looking application, and I encourage others to take the blame as well.
What’s the point in taking science class after science class, cramming before tests until two in the morning, and doing homework during lunch just to try to get into a college we aren’t sure we want to go to yet? Wouldn’t it make more sense to experiment with classes and discover our passions so we can start developing some idea of what we want to do with the rest of our lives instead of doing what we should? What will make us money but leave us miserable?
We all have the power to take back our lives, however rigid and structured they have become, by exploring our options. There are other paths to take besides the four year college route, some as similar as applying for a transfer after going to community college for two years, and others as different as a gap year spent learning a language in another country or doing community service. College is not the best option for everyone, but everyone should feel comfortable planning their future according to their interests and no one else’s.
