Remember That Your College Experience Is About More Than Just Graduating

It was a typical Thursday morning as I woke up and felt the same emptiness feeling through my entire body. My head felt so heavy when I realized that the air was cold and the sky was not in the mood of showing the sun. I thought a decent sleep would take away all of my exhaustion and anxiety toward the life; but I was wrong. In this final year of college, I feel like a-dead-human-walking which is always making me feel like a failure; I am a Psychology student but I couldn’t even identify myself. Which one of the theories of human being that I didn’t comprehend completely? I can’t even identify which one of the needs from Maslow’s Hierarchy that I’m still lacking in.

The undeniable truth about life in the final year of college is everything seems so confusing yet exciting at the same time; it is when you realize that you are confronting the real life after college but you have to figure everything out at the same time. Everyone seems so busy making their own life plans and I am still here; contemplating my research paper variable. On top of that, my social media news feed was full of those pictures which shown people who were wearing the graduation suit, complete with some of those flower bouquets as well as the balloons in their hands, not to mention those happy faces which were reflecting freedom. Am I jealous? Yes, I am.

But the real question is, why should I get jealous?

Thinking back to all the years I had in college, I wasn’t being taught just to graduate. The Professors and all the lessons they taught weren’t even slightly told us about how to graduate; on how to get a perfect GPA or on how to graduate less than 4 years with a Cum Laude honor. I didn’t spend my sleepless nights to finish all the reports due those deadlines just in order to know the perfect and the fastest way to graduate. The struggles that I went through for these approximately 4 years were not only for those flower bouquets and some Helium balloons. No, college is not about that few hours of receiving my diploma and taking some pictures with your graduation suit.

More often than not, students merely forget the essential part of being an Undergraduate student until they confront the real world; meanwhile, those 4 years of college are actually all about the simulation of life. College years were teaching me about the beautiful mess of life; about its art and its lesson as well. College is when our life is more than those theories we found from the textbooks; it is when we discovered that the real problems in our life were not about finding the relationship between two variables or explaining a situation based on theories.

I do believe that actually, college is all about the struggles, failures, lessons, and endless new experiences with its unique thrills in each moment. College is about that time when I cried in the first week of living alone and I had to figure out what to eat every night. It is about the struggles of finishing those never ending assignments and projects which were followed by the efforts of balancing my social life and the fun of being 20s. College is all about losing friends and getting a best friend, failing the scholarship selections and getting chances to join some organizations; college is all about losing yourself but finding what makes you feel alive instead.

College is about that excitement rush which is going through your veins when you will run a big project on your campus, it is the time when you discover that your true passion is not in your major or vice versa, and it is the time when you push yourself to the limit as you try to sign yourself as the head of a division or as the President of the Student Union. College is the time when you are able to unleash your potential of being the person who can inspire other youths.

College is the hard work of finishing your final project or research paper; it is all about the process of building your scientific framework and your critical thinking ability. It is about improving your assertiveness and communication skills as you try to always keep in touch with your colleagues and your lecturers; it is about regulating your emotions, keeping up your persistence towards hard works, and failing million times but you are still able to stand up straight.

Remember that you shouldn’t always have to follow all the indicators of success according to the society, simply because actually, you define your own success indicators as a college student. Your college life is not a race; it’s not about who will graduate faster than the others.

Ignore those social media news feeds and cherish each moment as you realize that college is not always about graduating, but it’s about what you have got during those 4 years of struggles. Believe that someday, you will reach that point when you are finally graduating and it doesn’t mean anything unless it is the sign that you are ready to facing the real struggles toward the real life.

Always remember that at the end of the day; hard work pays off.