Last year of college – that time of your college life, when being overwhelmed becomes an every other day phenomenon. You are about to graduate. If you stay in a hostel or a PG, you would be moving out. You will be giving many entrances or sitting for placements. Where should you go? Should you work or study some more? Should you take a break or dive right into something new? A lot of questions keeping popping into one’s head and well, there are no right or wrong answers.
I remember when I reached my third year of college, I was also drowned in a surge of emotions. I did not have a plan. After three years of studying journalism, I found myself unsure about where to go next. I sat for placements diligently like many others in my batch and found myself unemployed by the end of it.
After studying for three years in a privileged institution, I had begun to feel a sense of entitlement. You feel that things will happen for you, and if they don’t go as planned, you would end up feeling lost, or worse, disillusioned. Letting go of the entitlement is a challenge that many of us struggle with and that can be a trigger for many problems.
Graduation is an underrated experience, and it can overwhelm you in more than one way. I am no one to counsel people or guide them, but from whatever I have seen after my graduation and learnt through my peers, it is that things take time to work out. Maybe not immediately, maybe not today or even tomorrow but they tend to fall into place. Take the time you need, if you have the luxury to figure things out. Things aren’t going to be a cakewalk from now but being hard on yourself would not be of much help either.
From what I learned from graduation is that there is no set path hereon. This is not to say that people should not plan, by all means, go figure out where you ought to be next. But if on the last day of your exams, when you are about to leave your familiar space one last time, and you feel like you don’t have anywhere to go next, it is okay. Your friends might have gotten placed, many of them getting acceptance letters from the best universities across the world, and you are still wondering where you are headed to. This is all hard to process. This is all tough to deal with and if you can’t cope up alone, ask for help.
Transitions are complex. My plan after college would finish turned to be different than what I had thought of it to be but it has worked out well so far. I got through Masters in Mass Communication at AJKMCRC two years ago, and I am about to graduate again in one month. The emotions are back, so what’s next? The future seems daunting but as I leave another university, this time around I will try to stress less. I will figure things out, but I will not pressurise or guilt myself into believing that I am not good enough. I will survive, one day at a time.