College: over too soon, but not fast enough

Counting down the days left until graduation is a mixed bag of emotions.

With 10 days left I feel ecstatic. The world is open. I’m no longer controlled by seemingly arbitrary and rapidly changing rules of the university.

At nine days I feel hopeful. My job applications are spread throughout the nation, and my references and resumes are perfected and distributed.

At eight I feel lost. I have nowhere to live and my career is undecided while my safety net is rapidly shrinking.

Seven, six, five, etc. … I go from terrified to thrilled and every emotion in between. It is because this system is broken. College traps us in a bubble “preparing” us for life after. But how prepared are we?

It’s the same problem as the transition from high school to college. There is no way to prepare someone for something without letting him or her experience it.  Unless you did concurrent enrollment, you had no real idea how college worked until you showed up on day one. As it turns out it wasn’t that big of an adjustment – if you are reading this you probably dealt with the transition just fine.

Transition from college to real life seems like a much bigger jump. Internships and jobs during your collegiate years show you at least the work-force side of adulthood. Where do we get real- life experience from though? Where do we learn how to shop for apartments, budget for moving expenses or manage household affairs?

These are all things we can eventually figure out and problems that we can adjust to, but they all take time. As a student only days away from graduation, I can tell you that we do not have enough time.

Life in these few months is a catch-22. Finals, presentations, grades and graduation events take over. We need to be focusing on a future career, a home after leaving campus and budgeting for necessities that college provided. However, we cannot get a job without a degree, we cannot lease an apartment without a job and we cannot worry about any of that with important tests and projects looming over us.

We need an extra week. Post-finals and pre-life, we need an additional stress-free get-our-life-together week, because we can’t do everything at once.

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