School Is Winding Down (#J360)

It’s that time of year again: final exams, projects due, sleepless nights and nights of cramming last minute information into your brain with the risk of information overload. It seems like the days will never end, but eventually they do and you have the pleasure of knowing that you won’t have to do the same routine until the end of the next semester.

What happens after gradation/you are no longer in school? What comes next? This thought is both enlightening an troubling at the same time. I’m quickly approaching my graduation in the spring of 2015, which is fantastic, but I am troubled by what comes next. I have not known a life out of school. I have been in some sort of educational institute for nearly all of my life, never taking more than four to six months off between breaks and taking two semesters off in between changing colleges/majors. On top of that, I have had the same job for the past almost nine years and it has been my only job.

As graduation grows near, my anxiety of what comes next grows just as much. I worry about what job I’ll be able to find, about my crippling school debt, my current financial situations and all of that fun stuff. Will the choices I’ve made up to this point lead up to the big payoff I hope to receive?  Who knows?

At the end of the day, I take solace in the fear of the unknown. It’s not my place to know what the future holds for me. Instead, it is my place to do my best to control what happens in my future. If I want my dream job, I work for it; if I want to pay my school debt quickly, I’ll work hard to do so. In the end, I am in control of my own destiny. My foreseeable future is not predestined.