What I really learned in college

 

In August 2010 I found myself, like many other angsty, spirited Millennials, navigating through the hallowed marble gates of my new college, decorating dorm rooms and searching crowded lecture halls. I thought my reward for acing the SAT and juggling five high school extracurricular activities was a map to the perfect college campus – and thus, the map to success.

I made it across the country with a crisp campus map in hand that I studied meticulously on my eastbound flight. I had spent the last four years planning the next four years of college, drawing what I saw as my much-needed ‘roadmap to success.’ I knew what to do along the route – fulfill graduation requirements, beef up a paper resume, and learn the ins and outs of LinkedIn networking – so that success would be straight ahead of graduation day.

But college has a funny way of changing your intended route. Along the way you distill your thoughts down to ten-page papers, add filters to your Saturday night pictures, re-edit cover letters for a couple dozen internship positions. You spend four years falling in and out of ‘like,’ (what 22-year-old Millennial knows what ‘love’ is anyway?), switching your major and changing you mind on everything from your favorite drink to your favorite American author.

You hope your eight semesters of liberal arts classes and part-time internships will validate the roadmap you created. But somewhere along the way you realize that the map you held onto with unwavering conviction has more detours and stop signs than open roads and green lights. You start college with certainty and you end it with a certain amount of doubt, as the map you gripped onto so tightly has frayed and faded and failed to get you exactly where you intended to go.

Prior to graduation day, you are asked two inevitable questions. 1) ‘What are you doing next year?’ and 2) ‘What do you wish you knew as a freshman?’

I wish I could go back and tell myself it is okay to be lost. It is okay to take detours and veer off from your roadmap completely. It is fine to run into several red lights, even if they turn up consecutively. In fact, it is preferable.

I would tell myself to embrace and learn from the times where you are literally lost; like the first time you try to navigate public transportation alone in an unfamiliar city sans iPhone (thank you Boston for this life lesson).

You may lose your wallet and part of your dignity during one of your first adventure downtown. Most likely you will lose your sanity after several consecutive all-night library sessions.

But make sure you get lost in other ways, too. Get lost in deep conversation until 4am with a friend who has a very different worldview than you. Lose yourself in a good book suggested to you by a complete stranger. Get lost in a class that makes you rethink the basics. The beauty of being lost is that it makes you feel at times invincible and at time vulnerable. But it ultimately forces you to move forward.

Get lost. Multiple times. And feel free to gradate still feeling lost.

The key is to get lost without losing yourself. Use this opportunity to search your true self, not the person you attempted to find at the end of a pre-determined roadmap four years ago.

Now it’s May 2014 and I’ve completed my final papers and crammed for my last exam. The only certainty I have is that there is a fascinating, complicated life waiting on the other side of that graduation stage. I don’t have such a definite roadmap anymore, and that is just fine. The best of the millennial spirit is curious and craves connection; it is searching for more. And that is enough of a roadmap for me.