Brown: Enjoy college while it lasts

Sunday, August 23, 2009

While most college students are sad to see the end of summer and the start of classes, I am glad. I spent the summer at home staring at clocks and counting down on calendars. I begged time to move quickly so I could return to Lawrence and my life as a college student.

Now as I begin my junior year at the University of Kansas, the X’s on my calendar are proof that time does pass, even though we can’t feel it.

My first two years of college have passed by as quickly as my summers have been slow, and ironically now I wish time would stop. As a junior I am expected to have it all figured out. As a junior I am required to declare a major and to plan a career path.

I will need to face the world in a short two years and make my place among employees, office buildings and salaries. But as I sit here, halfway through college, I know that I don’t have it all figured out, and my calendar reminds me that time won’t wait.

I always have several goals as I begin each semester. Some goals are achieved and some have remained on my list since I began making lists.

For this semester I plan to add “figure life out” right below “stop procrastinating” and “quit biting nails.’ Maybe I will mark it off my list this semester. Maybe, by December, I will finally know exactly where I am going and exactly where I need to be. But maybe I won’t, and maybe I never will.

As a college student I have become overwhelmed with the need to plan. I have convinced myself that the perfect combination of classes during perfectly organized semesters will make me the most prepared to face an unstable job market. I have become obsessed with attempting to draw the perfect road map to success. But then again, is success really something to be planned?

We have been told all our lives to “live life to the fullest,” and of all the things we do not know, one’s future is the most uncertain. Yet we plan and we schedule and we never pause to think that perhaps there is beauty in never knowing.

Time will not comply despite how much we might beg it to speed up or slow down. We just keep living while growing older every day. In two years the world will be waiting for me, and I can only hope I will be ready.

As the summer comes to an end and a new year begins, I feel pressured to form a plan. I feel the stress of needing to figure it all out.

But for now maybe the best plan for success is to simply let time pass. At the top of every college student’s to do list should be “enjoy these four years”, because as we have been told, and as with all good things, this will go much too fast.

— Brown is a Wichita junior double majoring in journalism and political science.

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