So.
Spring Break is coming up, friends are coming home, and the first chunk of my last semester as an underclassmen comes to a close. This is the time where even I, who lives a mere 45 minutes away from my nest, will be going home for the first time in three months. Ah, awayhood. It's remarkable, but all good things come to an end. Soon, the list of things I put off from worrying about will become inevitable: my major requirements, my graduate school/medical school requirements, whether I'm doing enough volunteer work or not, whether I'm doing enough research, whether I'll graduate in four years, whether I'm a decent enough person to want to be a doctor, and how I'm going to prove that I am in a two page essay. These things never end, do they?
It had become clear to me, only very recently, that the rest of the world has a whole different list to worry about. I was complacent in my academic bubble, where all my friends are "motivated" and "going places", where their list is just as long as mine, and not very different in content. But I've been working with older people, people who went to those small, pretty, liberal art colleges that you hear about, and it's just been surprising how different my options could have been. These kids had tripped-out campus wide acid Halloween parties, interdisciplinary majors that they shaped themselves, and friends scattered all over the 50 states. And after graduation, they're fine with getting a job at a small co-op kitchen baking pastries, or manning the till at an eco-boutique, where they'll work for maybe two years before enrolling themselves in graduate school to pursue a masters in Communications or Art. And then they'll float on to another job, couch-surf when they're low on cash, live with their friends in different major cities, and bike through it like they own the world. It's unthinkable how free it is. I feel like this is the new intellectual elite. They're not stupid. They can spell Zeitgeist, tell you what the definition of Qualia is, and yet feels just as ease in a library as in a second-hand record store.
Meanwhile, the "leaders in the making" here at the highest ranking universities are clawing their way through hoops trying to become Somebody. Ambition is the tool of the trade. A good dose of ambition, some smarts, and a strong shot of work-ethics make the best and the brightest. I mean, it's a brilliant and awesome thing, when our beloved campus powers through finals week. High-powered caffeine shots are bartered, and other more potent energizers are traded in the back alleys of intelligentsia. But we lose sight. I have forgotten the why, gotten lost in the how. "This is how I am going to be successful" is defined, instead of "This is why what I want means success". What is success? Is it a high pay after years of education? Or is it being able to do the things you love, at your own pace?
Of course, the two need not be mutually exclusive. I can't honestly define success in terms of the amount of jobs I've had, or the amount of couches I've surfed. I can't honestly say that I want a life of freedom, where I can work in a shop for two years, live with my boyfriend in a run-down flat, and move to the next city if I felt like it. It's too uncertain, too much out of the comfort zone of the stable highschool-college-graduate school-career life path that have been defined for me, that I have grown up with. I'm trying to reconcile what I am doing today with what I deem as success in the future: get a professional degree so that you can actually do the things you want to do, with the least amount of barriers. It is more likely for me to make an impact with a medical degree than without. It is more likely for me to have a life I want to live with years of education than without. And whenever I get upset over my workload, get angry at the dumbshits who can't see the bigger picture beyond their GPA, or feel like giving up (become prostitute, move to Germany, live in co-op, die of AIDS at 27), I'm going to try to set my eyes on the horizon. This is for something, Melissa. It's not tedious scramble. It's for Something.
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