How to Make a Plan for the Rest of Your Life

Welcome to the next four or seven years of your life: College. Over 3,840 hours spent on an attendance certificate.

This is my life, a full time student and a part time writer. Learning what college teaches best:

1. Things that you need to know.
2. Things that you will never need to know again.

Despite this, college has a formative out-of-the-classroom experience. It is all part of the after-adolescence development period and almost just as painful.

We spend most of our first three to four years at our chosen school, wandering around, completely lost. We don’t have money. We don’t know who we are. We don’t know what kind of person we want to date. We don’t know what kind of person we want to be. Most of all, we don’t know what we want to do with the next 50 years of our life.

But the pressure is on high. Now is the time to make small decisions that will have major effects. And we feel completely unqualified for the task.

Our energy is much too focused on the conversations of the people around us, or fantasizing about that one boy in that one class that we never get to actually talk to. Or maybe just making it through, one class at a time, one paper at a time, one grade at a time. Semesters pass and we loose track of what we are doing.

So we change majors.

We sleep, eat (if we have the money) and try to find a date. We get an internship and bore ourselves mindless.

So we change majors.

We fail a class, waste a whole day on Facebook and spend all our money on a new TV to watch that reality TV show about our career. Then end up changing majors.

I may or may not be speaking from major life experiences.

Last week a high school senior asked me to help her figure out her plan for the next four years. Her question was simple enough: “How did you pick your major, Leia? I am so confused. I don’t know what I want to do.”

I have drastically changed majors three times. It was stressful, I cried frequently. A black cloud of indecision and insecurity has hung over these last three years of schooling. I have absolutely no advice for this girl, a mere three majors behind me. She should probably accept the fact that she may cry more than necessary.

Being a girl comes with a certain catch; you cry a lot. At least I did. I cried about my major, my stupid job, my slim paycheck and how impossible it is to stick with “plan A.” Over 50 percent of freshman change their majors. Hello seven years and $20,000 of debt later.

Only a semester ago I was wearing scrubs and studying organic chemistry in LA. Now I live in Sacramento and spend the majority of my time on the internet thinking about life, love, the pursuit of happiness and things to write about.

Life changes faster than a freshman changes majors.

Yet those relationships that stuck through the tears and the changes of personality and geography, those are the friendships that have been the most beautiful and influential. Whether I am going to be an architect, a writer, a nurse or a singer, I still have these places and these memories and these people.

Sometimes I think that we all just need to calm down. I am going to stop trying to figure out the rest of my life. I can barely make the first step. Let’s focus on that. My goal is to graduate and beyond that, the future is a dim adventure.

But I digress. This column isn’t about me. It’s about college, the painful and enlightening experience that has nothing to do with the 3,840 hours you spend in class, learning something interesting, something you don’t want to learn or absolutely nothing.