Dear freshmen,
Congratulations! If your guidance counselors handed you a five-year plan at the ripe age of 14, you have officially reached year five. Surely you have your whole life figured out now, right?
Up until this point, you’ve been preparing for the exact journey on which you are about to embark, but I’m going to let you in on a little secret: no one is actually prepared for life after graduation, and we need to start rejecting the unrealistic notion that anyone can be.
Back to that five-year plan – how’s that been going for you so far? Are you on your way to pursue the career you chose as a freshman in high school? While I’m sure some of you are, you have other classmates who have changed their career path several times since then, who have decided college isn’t the right fit for them or who have suffered many an existential crisis trying to figure out what they want to do with their lives.
As for me, I fit into that last category. And I use the word “fit” in its present tense, not past.
Yes, you heard that correctly: I am going into my senior year of college, and I still do not know what I’m going to do with my life.
My poor five-year plan has gone entirely out the window, as I’m pretty sure I said I wanted to be an actress on Broadway whilst creating it. Spoiler alert: I never applied for that prestigious musical theatre school, and I am not getting any callbacks for a lead role in a Broadway show any time soon.
I may be a senior in college, but I also just turned 21 at the end of July, and I was freshly 18 when I eagerly started at Marshall. Most people wouldn’t trust an 18-year-old to decide what’s for dinner tonight, let alone how they will contribute to society for the next 40 years.
According to the University of South Florida, “an estimated 20-50 percent of students enter college undecided, and up to 75 percent report having changed their major at least once.”
Additionally, a 2024 article by Forbes reported that more than half of recent college graduates entered the workforce in a job unrelated to their degree.
Now, I am, by no means, encouraging anyone to spend their money on an unnecessary degree or to float through life without any guidance. As a matter of fact, I’m telling you that it’s important to find mentors, seek out work experiences and reach out to the Office of Career Education early in your college career.
But, it’s also equally important for you to give yourself some grace.
I recently saw a TikTok that said, “Reminder that at 25, you’re only on season one of ‘Friends,’ with two years until the start of ‘How I Met Your Mother,’ four years until ‘New Girl’ and seven years until ‘Sex and the City.’”
While you are – sometimes unfortunately – living in reality and not in a television series, this serves as a great reminder that the next season of your life is going to be full of new friendships, breakups, bills, jobs and a whole lot of unknowns. More importantly, this is a reminder that many people still do not have it all figured out by their 30s – and you and I still have a long way before we get there.
To quote my favorite Billy Joel song (and one of my all-time favorite songs), “Slow down, you’re doing fine / You can’t be everything you want to be before your time.”
So, if you’re feeling anxious about the next four years, and no one else has told you: I’m proud of you, and you’re going to do great things. Give yourself a pat on the back for pursuing higher education, regardless of whether or not you know the career you’re pursuing.
Forrester Research predicts our generation will change jobs 12 to 15 times before retirement anyway, so try to keep in mind that your decisions now are not necessarily permanent and all you can do is use your best judgment with the information you have at the time.
There are endless possibilities waiting for you in college and beyond. Don’t limit yourself to something you chose on a whim five years ago.
It’s okay not to know.
Baylee Parsons can be contacted at [email protected].
