College senior Dan Ferman admits he’s scared. Nevertheless, he embraces the challenges ahead.
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Many say that your college years are the best years of your life. Well, they’re right. What these same people don’t tell you is that your college years, while exciting and enlightening, are also some of the most terrifying of your life (as far as I have come to know in my 22 years).
This is a time of independence, of being away from home, of learning new skills, and of meeting so many wonderful and new people. But it is also the time where individuals like me must start thinking about the world after college–the real world. A world where Spring Break doesn’t exist. Where there is more to life than going to class, going to parties, and getting a good GPA. It means entering the world and trying to make a difference somehow. More importantly, finding your place within the world outside of college.
Like any college senior, I am excited, restless, and lately apprehensive. I am not afraid to admit that I’m scared, though. Daunting is the word I would use to explain the concept of graduation. As I write this, I’m in the process of applying to graduate school, which is an intimidating process in itself. I feel as if the whole point of college, and the life after, is to bring us face to face with formidable circumstances and see how we meet these challenges.
All of our associations and friendships in college lead us there, but it is our duty to enter that world alone, strengthened by the bonds we’ve made during those past four years of our lives.
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Perhaps the best metaphor I can use to describe my thoughts and feelings about graduation and the real world comes from an experience in my fraternity. My brothers and I had an event where we had to get over a bar (think of a limbo stick): we couldn’t go around the bar, nor under, or even touch it. All brothers had to make it over the bar without disturbing it. If someone messed up, we reset and tried again. The point of the event was to work alongside your brothers to accomplish the task and have faith in them to see you over the bar safely.
We make friends, we rely on those friends to help us through those formidable obstacles, and we rejoice when we’ve reached our goals. But, as we enter the real world, we depart college alone. We are guided to the threshold of the real world and left there. And that is what this transition is, a threshold to either cross or stand there with our feet on the edge. All of our associations and friendships in college lead us there, but it is our duty to enter that world alone, strengthened by the bonds we’ve made during those past four years of our lives.
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As an individual studying psychology, it always amazes me how I can be so intimidated by the real world, knowing that in actuality I’m intimidating myself. The world cannot do anything to me. I cause my apprehension, fear, etc. Even in knowing this, I still feel those emotions. I think that’s because it’s good to feel some sort of apprehension at the threshold of a new stage in life. This mindset makes me thankful for all I have now and drives me to enjoy the last few months of my undergraduate career.
There’s a poem by Rudyard Kipling, titled, If (1943), and in the poem, after a series of charges to the reader, he ends by saying if you can do all of these things and still try in the face of adversity, “…you’ll be a Man, my son!” To me, this is what life is about, this is what graduation and the threshold of matriculation into a graduate school is about. The only story in the history of the world is the story of humankind’s struggle to conquer over those voices in our heads and our hearts telling us that something is too difficult, or too daunting.
The truth is, nothing is ever too difficult or too daunting. We’re just not ready to tell ourselves that at the time.
Image credit: cnewtoncom/flickr