Where do we go from here?

At Duke, each undergraduate year has had some sort of overarching theme for me. Freshman year — the eagerness of leaving home, being immersed with hundreds of new faces from different backgrounds, the shopping around of classes and the beginning of nagging questioning about the identities that shaped us growing up. Sophomore year — the switch to a new campus, a rearrangement of friend groups, a solidification of academic goals, a fluctuation between feeling confident and incompetent. Junior year — my most socially established year, most politically engaged, most confident in the ways I wanted to contribute to the world. But senior year rolls around, and while I try to stay rooted in meaningful friendships and savor moments of fun, I can’t shake off the feeling of being rushed to figure out the next chapter in my life even while the future seems so hazy. What is at the crux of this point in every Dukie’s life, and how does each generation get through it successfully?

Perhaps why senior year can feel so difficult and confusing is that we’re forced to do two things simultaneously. We must look back on the last three years of our Duke career and make some kind of cohesive meaning out of it while at the same time thinking of every possibility for what could suit us after undergrad. I lay out my past college involvement like a deck of cards: political advocacy groups, studying Asian and Middle Eastern languages, independent linguistics research, teaching English abroad, writing. But then I also have to lay out every possibility for my post-Duke life, trying to best guess what will suit my personal needs, what I will be qualified to do and what will help me achieve the kinds of things I dream of. In the end, though, it really is all guesswork. I can listen to stories from friends and family all day and go to all of the fabulous resume-building workshops that Duke sponsors, but some things you can’t really ever know unless you experience them firsthand. All stages of life require leaps of faith.

What might also make decisions about post-college life difficult is all of our attachments to the communities that we came from or became part of and to the people who helped us get all the way to this point. College education, especially at a private American university, comes at an enormous price, but its benefits do not necessarily correlate to payoffs in the real world in an even fashion. We pay for a holistic experience, for a bundle of all kinds of learning and opportunity, but can it really guarantee job security in the way we want to envision? Some of us may face overburdening student debt after graduating. Some may feel indebted to family who helped to pay for this incredible gift of higher education. Students who are first-generation college students or first-generation Americans might feel a huge pressure after graduation to prove it to their families or communities that they have “made it” in the American dreamscape.

But finding a balance between where we’re wanted and what we want in the first place is probably never easy. And I’m sure for many of us, it will be difficult to cash in our dreams and get accepted to our top choices right away. Maybe it’ll take years to sort things out: get a job, work a year or two, decide you absolutely hate it and do a 180 degree flip. Maybe at some point we’ll have to decide between what pays the bills and our passions, between aiming to cause change in the world for the better and aiming for something realistic like personal happiness.

I also won’t pretend to be immune to Duke’s competitive culture. When I hear of friends having already received offers from places they interned at over the summer, I feel mildly jealous that they already have sense of security and certainty in their futures. Sometimes I feel inadequate when I compare myself to other students and their accomplishments as if all the things that I’ve experienced and achieved myself somehow look pathetic through my own pessimistic lens. Or, on the other hand, I see people like Malala Yousafzai, already a Nobel Peace Prize recipient as a teenager, who are just now about to enter university. I am about to graduate from university, and this famously fierce advocate for universal education hasn’t even begun the journey of higher education yet? I am too much in awe.

At this point in my own life, I have personal goals and dreams of pursuing graduate school in fields that I love, even though it seems strange for someone to spend so much of their life on this planet in classes and in the library. But that’s just one of the infinite possible paths diverging from this moment, the present. Whatever path I end up taking in this next stage of life, I will have to accept warts and all. Nothing will ever be perfect; life will always have moments of regret and opportunities to change and do better. At every moment, you will have to listen to your heart and all of your sources of wisdom and inspiration in order to understand how to navigate the roads of this life. In the grand scheme of things, then, freshman year and senior year aren’t so different after all.

I have this image in my mind of senior year at Duke as Miley Cyrus and myself as Nicki Minaj at the VMAs. Senior year has got me twisting and turning, jumping through hoops to try to navigate paths in the future, and sometimes it might even talk bad about me behind my back. But, in the words of Nicki Minaj, who rarely backs down in the face of opposition, I can answer back: “Senior year, what’s good?”

Drew Korschun is a Trinity senior. His column runs on alternate Tuesdays.