For eighteen years, I have never once questioned why I go to school. It has always been clearly understood that I need to succeed in order to get into the college that I want to. As a sixth grader, when my mom suggested that I take Latin because it would help me score well on my SAT, I didn’t stop to wonder why I was preparing for something that I wouldn’t have to even worry about for another five to six years.
Well now it’s less than a month in front of all of my classmates and me and my sense of life-security is beginning to deteriorate as I realize that this whole system is just a gamble.
Sure, if you work hard, get good grades and do some community service, you’ll get into college; that much can be guaranteed. But what about after that? Can your parents guarantee that if you work hard and graduate from college with a certain degree you can do what you want to do?
We have been taught our whole lives that with hard work and determination, we can succeed at anything we want to do. This is all true until you have that sad realization that these skills can only take you so far.
When I went to SLUH from Clayton freshman year, I was so used to the “Everyone’s a winner” philosophy that I didn’t think twice about playing football. I got a real wakeup call, however, when at tryouts I got my 120 pound freshman self tossed ten feet into the air by a six-foot-four behemoth named Darion. I don’t need to tell you that I didn’t make the team.
The thing is, most of us are going to have this feeling come college graduation when the “Follow your dreams” attitude (that I have held on to for years) becomes a euphemism for fighting to the top. What our parents and teachers forget to tell us is that a lot of us won’t reach this “dream,” a kind of Nirvana that college graduates use hundreds of thousands of dollars and several degrees to get close to.
But that’s not what seniors think about now. It’s all about getting to that point that people are focused on. Kids skip class and party more senior year not in a celebratory fashion, but as a means of distraction. “Senioritis” is really just a disease caught by seniors way too freaked out to deal with applying and going to college. The thing is, you can’t escape it; or even set it aside for a night. I’m growing weary of going to a party and the topic of every conversation being college. Well it scares me that four years from now my college graduation will involve me sitting alone and broke with a bottle of red wine, longing to have a few more years of school where I am able to use “preparation” to further put off my life.
But I have too many chips on the table now to go back and do anything differently. As a matter of fact, I don’t think that I would go back and do it differently. I’m not trying to put down the traditional system that has been used in this country for years, I’m just inviting people to take a step back and see it for what it is: uncertainty.