On fullfillment.

“What do you want to do after graduation?”
“Oh, well, um. I’m not really sure.”
“Really, no idea?”
“Yeah, not really.”
“Why did you study what you study?”
“It is realtively interesting to me.”
“But what can you use the degree for?”
“Just pass the salt, please.”

That first question, and this entire exchange, does an excellent job of capturing the crisis of an undergraduate student’s senior year.

Having invested tens of thousands of dollars and indebted myself for life in order to attain a degree, I am at an utter loss about what is next. I’ve spent the last four years dedicating my time to having a college experience. I wrote papers, drank shitty beer, and worked campus jobs. Eventually, I moved on to writing longer papers, drinking less shitty beer, and working a retail job.

This is the same life that many other people my age have lived. From high school onwards, the expectation is set. I will attend a four year university and study something that I enjoy. After graduation, I will either attend graduate school, or begin working a job that pays well enough to afford me a relatively mediocre apartment in a city filled with other young professionals just. like. me.

At least, that’s what it feels like.

So much time is spent trying to fulfill the expectation that I will work hard and find a path that I enjoy, that I find myself unable to work hard or find a path that I enjoy.

No, college isn’t evil. No, *the man* isn’t holding me down. College is an excellent time of life to figure out how to think, and how to be citizen of the nation and of the world. But it seems that within this time of life there existed little chance for me to opt out, and even less chance for me to take a breath and enjoy myself academically.

For all the opportunity I am given to learn how to think differently, there seemed little opporutnity to *live* differently.

There was probably no way of having known this sooner. But, in this moment, what I and those like myself can do is simply be okay with answering the dreaded ~job question~ with “I don’t know, but I really don’t give a shit at the moment.”

After four years, some of us just want to steer our own ships.