Collegio Online

Issue date: 3/27/08 Section: Opinion

Media Credit: Rebecca Bauman

Twenty-some-odd years of being cared for can do a lot of damage.

Granted, not all 20-somethings know what it's like to be carried or coddled. Parents guide their children in any number of ways - some kids have been working since they could raise a rake or change a diaper.
Others have never had a real hairnet, sweat-stain, carpal-tunnel kind of job.
But college is not "a job," no matter what your parents might tell you. College, though often stressful and frenzied in its own way, is, at least, familiar to what young people have known all their lives.
It's school. It's a segregated group of mostly young people with common goals and, for the most part, common backgrounds. It's there to serve you, to teach you, to guide you, to nourish you and prepare you. It's work for the sake of self-improvement, for the sake of earning a grade, not a paycheck.

Although, in the end, one must acknowledge that all those grades are often earned on the promise of a future paycheck.

The idea of competing for the sake of survival, not academic prowess, is a heavy one. That, after college, one is no longer guaranteed success simply by working hard is frightening. Darn near paralyzing.

What if, after college, you can't get the job you want? Or any job at all? Have you heard that we're in a recession?

What if, after all this time and energy and money, you end up having to spend your days scraping the melted cheese off the quesadilla grill at Taco Tico?

What if, after college ... there's nothing? Only death and minimum wage?

This fear, regardless of whether it's irrational, is not unknown to the average college upperclassman. As graduation approaches, an individual who feels such anxiety can go one of any number of ways. Some popular choices:

a) Send out 140 resumes and hound employers until a job is secured.

b) Choose to work a less-than-glamorous job until a more appropriate vocational fit becomes available.

c) Change one's major to ensure that the post-graduate years will be spent in a more soulfully appetizing field.
d) Enroll in grad school.

It's c and d that bother me. All too often, what might otherwise seem an understandable continued and planned investment in one's college career is actually just the product of a twitchy student attempting to put off the inevitable: growing up.

That said, I'm not really one to talk. I am a 24-year-old freshman who's spent the last six years of her life getting her proverbial crap together. I know well the fear of the post-graduate years being dismal and unfulfilling, and I haven't even gotten my PE credit.

Continued...

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