For graduating seniors, the real world is looming. Within weeks will we turn in final papers, take final exams, walk across a stage at Ryan Field (barring alternate plans in case of rain), pack our belongings, say goodbye to many of our friends and head into the big, scary world.
Well, that’s one way to look at it. I admit that my head has been spinning with all the changes other seniors and I must contend with in such a short time. But the “real world” conception of life after college versus the “unreal world” of undergraduate life strikes me as false.
Looking at life that way minimizes the very real experiences we have during college and before that. It creates this idea that life begins and ends with 9-to-5 jobs and mortgages. Everything before was just playtime, and after is waiting to die.
Sure, my fellow seniors and I will have plenty of new challenges after graduation: car payments, student loan payments, bosses and co-workers, unstructured time for work and play, parents less willing to bail us out when we can’t pay the rent, the inability to skip work as easily as some people skipped class.
Many people will spend more time in school to further their career opportunities or just to avoid the aforementioned challenges for a few more years. Many others will spend time struggling to find an interesting job that pays the bills.
But none of that should diminish the lives we lead in college. As freshmen, we threw ourselves into a new environment, many of us far from home. We learned the standard bits of information about dormmates — name, school, hometown — and began to form the support networks to get us through the next four years. Those interpersonal skills will serve us well with co-workers and colleagues in the “real world.”
As sophomores and juniors, we dug into more advanced course work and decided on majors and areas of concentration. Some of us studied abroad, where we faced our identities as Americans in countries where U.S. policies became unpopular, adjusted to foreign languages and foreign cultures or simply enjoyed the lower legal drinking age. Those experiences shaped our perspectives on academic, personal and political issues.
Others of us just skated along, drinking on the weekends — often Sunday through Thursday, too — and doing the bare minimum in class. Those people learned somewhere along the way to relax and enjoy the ride.
But most of us became involved in some extracurricular activity, from a fraternity or sorority to a cultural group, an intramural or club sport to a philanthropic or theater troupe.
Those interests taught us time management and leadership skills — or at least how to get by on less sleep.
Now as seniors, I hope we appreciate life at Northwestern, not as some prelude to the “real world,” but as part of life, integral to whatever comes next.
Elaine Helm is a Medill senior. She can be reached at [email protected].
