Ever since I was a kid, I’ve been a planner. For every play date and birthday party I had, there was a corresponding itinerary of activities with carefully allocated time slots. Of course, there was some slight flexibility with the time frames, but mostly I made sure everything went how I had planned. In other words, one might’ve classified my elementary school self as a “control freak.”
As I got older, I still obsessively planned my life and activities out, but instead of making birthday party itineraries, I was making plans for my future: which classes to take with what teachers and when, what colleges to look at, which extracurricular activities to get involved in and even more trivial things like what color homecoming and prom dresses I would get for each year. According to the incredibly premature plans I made for myself, I was on my way to becoming a pediatrician after getting an undergraduate degree from Georgetown and attending medical school at Duke.
Only it never actually works out that way. Instead, I found myself going through high school and realizing I had a variety of different interests, and maybe I wasn’t entirely set on the medical school path anyway. I also found that no matter how much time I spent in the guidance office, there was no way my schedule could fit all the classes I wanted with all the best teachers. Finally, when senior year rolled around, I had to accept the fact that I wasn’t going to my dream school, Georgetown — like I had originally thought — because I didn’t get in. My high school years made me realize that things weren’t always going to pan out the way I wanted them to; while I had full control over myself and my decisions, I had no grasp on the many other factors that lead to my fate.
Similar things have happened since being in college. For me, like a lot of students, college was a transition I had never gone through before. The environment was entirely different than what I was used to in high school and it was difficult to keep up with everything. Going into the University, I had no idea that classes would be so tough and that there would be so little mercy and wiggle room when it came to grades. Moreover, I was unaware that extracurricular clubs and groups were so exclusive and also required a certain set of knowledge, achievements or personality types to be accepted. Needless to say, there were many times things didn’t go as I had expected.
Like me, you’ve probably experienced a let down of some kind throughout your time at the University. Five years ago, I’d probably be having a crisis moment of some sort because so far nothing has perfectly gone according to my plans. Something I’ve realized is that there are numerous factors outside of your control, and knowing that is crucial to understanding what you — individually — are capable of achieving and how to move forward from there. Some of my favorite things are here now because things didn’t go as planned in the past. I love this University and have met some incredible people during my time here that I wouldn’t have known had I gone to Georgetown.
To conclude: it’s usually never that serious, and as big as a setback may be, it will never truly be the end of the world. You might get rejected from the Commerce School, but there might be an even greater opportunity for you as an Economics major. You may have not gotten into U-Guides, but maybe being an RA will be a more valuable experience for you anyway. Not only is it important to take rejection lightly, but it is also crucial to grow from these setbacks. Let bygones be bygones, and let them make you better, too.
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