Senioritis

We’re all on a career/life path at this point, but where is that going? Photo by Unsplash

I’m laying in bed under a few thick blankets, awake again. There are a few reasons I desperately don’t want to get out of bed. It’s November and we haven’t turned on the heat yet, because we’re all poor broke (and stubborn) college students and it hasn’t snowed yet, so it really only gets super cold in the evenings and mornings. The tip of my nose is cold, and my blankets are warm from accumulating my body heat all night long.

The other reason I don’t want to get out of bed is because I just don’t see the point in going to class today (or any day). I mainly do it so I can get some social interaction during the day, but I certainly don’t go to learn content.

That’s a half-lie. I do go to learn content — for my professors, so I can pass their tests. I don’t really care so much about learning the content for my own benefit. It can be interesting at times, but is it actively helping me get a job? I find myself more and more torn between doing homework and applying to do real work, which, ironically, is the reason I decided to go to college in the first place (see the following graph with a breakdown of my stress levels about school vs finding work over my college career).

Figure 1.

I seem to have caught the senioritis bug that’s been going around. It doesn’t help that a lot of my friends are seniors too, and we’re all about to be off on our separate ways, getting jobs, going to grad school, getting married….

Sometimes, I just want to go back to bed.

I’m actually a pretty highly-motivated individual, or rather, I’ve become one being at school. You have to be able to work smart and hard these days. But my young adult mind is already full of things I wish I could have done differently in my college career and opportunities I may have missed by taking others. Do I regret the path I took to get here? At this point, there’s not much I can do to change it, so the best thing to do is make it better moving forward.

Of course, moving forward means dealing with more unknowns, which ultimately means I’ll make more mistakes and pass up more opportunities and have more regrets. So the unknown, while exciting and full of potential, can also be incredibly paralyzing.

And while struggling with these deeper philosophical and existential issues, I’m also supposed to turn in a busy work assignment, write a report, and start working ahead on all the group projects and presentations due after Thanksgiving.

What’s the point? I’d rather be doing more job searches on LinkedIn.