Leah’s Life Lessons, Follow your heart, you’ll go far
With the holidays quickly approaching, college students across the U.S. are looking forward to a few well deserved weeks of food, shopping and relaxation.
But with full bellies and big beds comes a price; the intrusive questions we’ve managed to dodge from distant relatives all year. “Who are you dating? How are your grades?” And let’s not forget the most intimidating “What are your plans after graduation?”
We dget in our seats, pushing our peas around our plates, and mumbling incoherent nonsense. But the truth is, we aren’t always sure, and that’s okay.
We’re still growing. Many of us have changed our majors once, twice or even more. We’re still guring out what we like, love and hate (here’s looking at you chemistry). But instead of mindlessly settling for a job that we know will make us money, many of us are choosing to take the road less traveled. We still believe what our parents told us so many years ago when we were declaring ourselves the next presidents, superheroes, princesses and firemen.
We believe that we can be whatever we want to if we’re willing to work hard for it. We shouldn’t settle for what’s easy or convenient.
We still have time to gure out what exactly we’re going to do. Lucky for us, there isn’t a set age where we have to have everything gured out. If you feel like you want to teach English in Bangladesh after graduation, then go for it. The economy and job market will still be here when you get back. Success isn’t going to come from hitting the ground running, degree in hand. It comes from hard work and determination.StarslikeJ.K. Rowling and Amy Schumer, who are reaching fame later in life, prove that we don’t have to have it all gured out by age 22.
We aren’t willing to settle. Yes, it would be easier to jump from the classroom to the mailroom, then climb our way up to the top where we’ll have an eight-hour-a-day job with bene ts and a corner of ce, but that dream isn’t for everyone. For those who want something different, the last thing we should do is settle for what our parents’ generation thinks we should do. We’re only given one life, and it would be tragic for us to wake up one day and regret how we’ve spent it.
So, if working as a barista and writing for a small audience is what makes you happy,then that’s exactly what you should do. Our success isn’t tied to our bank accounts.
While our parents’ generation focused more on stability, our generation has more access to other parts of the world than we’ve had in any other time in history. We have the ability to take jobs all over the world from Australia, to Germany, to Brazil. With social media branching work communities past country borders, knowing people and having different cultural experiences is becoming more important. These are things that will set us apart from the rest of the people we will eventually compete against for jobs.
So maybe we don’t have it all gured out. Maybe we don’t all have jobs lined up after graduation. But that’s okay because life is more thanajob,a401Kanda retirement plan. Life is about love, experiences, passion and happiness. So what if we don’t have it all gured out? Life isn’t a timeline or a checklist. It’s meant to be lived fully in the moment.