Letter to the Editor

To the Class of 2017,

We are at a weird crossroads of adulthood and non-adulthood. As my father puts it, we are “quasi-adults”, somewhere between booking our own flights and paying our own rent. Our twenties are an important decade; it’s the ten years where we graduate college, go on to pursue other ambitions, find jobs, fall in love, have kids. In these ten years, we will be old enough to legally drink, but at the end of it, we will be too old to find ourselves at clubs at 2AM. We will graduate from Duke, move to different cities and have to buy our own health insurance (thanks Obama). If the past two decades mattered, the one coming up really matters.

I am nineteen and three quarters, and I am thrilled and nervous to enter my twenties. I realize now that we are halfway done with our undergraduate experience. Four semesters behind us and four more to go. It is utterly terrifying how quickly these two years have passed by.

As Duke students, we all wonder if we are on the right path. We are afraid of screwing up our futures and making the wrong choices. We wish we had worked harder—obtained better grades, made more friends, established healthier routines, applied to more summer programs.

I can sense the overwhelming pressure amongst us. On a daily basis, I find myself consoling friends who feel like they are not on the right track—behind because they didn’t land an internship to work for Senator JP-Goldman-Morgan. I overhear conversations on the bus; we are all so busy, stressed, unsure.

But the beauty of being twenty is that we are only twenty. We are still incredibly young. It is not too late to do things differently. Don’t be hung up on things from the past. Don’t be afraid to be young and confused. Don’t be afraid to try new things. Let’s make the most of the next two years.

Sunny Zhang is a Trinity junior.