5 Ways College Prepares You for a False Reality

          Last week I finished the first semester of my senior year at the University of Indianapolis. As such, I breathed a huge sigh of relief after that last final and enjoyed the feeling of having no responsibilities...for about 2 minutes. Then several thoughts came rushing to my head. "What do I have to do next?" "What in the hell am I going to do after graduation?" "Why am I suddenly so unhappy?"

I thought being a theatre major would help me at least act happy.

          I love college, don't get me wrong. Where would my life be if I hadn't been able to walk a full mile in under 20 minutes in health, memorize the order of the events leading to the French Revolution in history, or imagine myself walking through Jell-O while also observing how my personal bubble interacted with others' in acting? But the truth is college prepares us very little for what life and even happiness is in the real world. That statement, "real world", in itself implies that we still think of college as a temporary and artificial segment of life, and rightfully so. College sets us up for unhappiness because in college...

Friendships are Incredibly Easy

          There is no other place on earth like college. If you chose to do so you could go out, party, and get drunk every weekend of the year. Every time you walk to class you pass by dozens if not hundreds of people who think and act just like you or very similarly to you. Think about it. At any point of the school year we are all stressed about some test, wondering when the next gathering or party will be, and worried about how we look and how we are presenting ourselves. It's amazing to me the amount of people who complain about not being able to make friends.

I'm just being myself! What am I doing wrong!?

          I understand that it is much more difficult for some people to put themselves out there and seek out friends. It's more complicated than simply being yourself and letting friends come to you. But in college we have an excuse to be around all our friends all the time. We are forced into classrooms and dorms and live with a community of our closest friends for months on end.

But in reality...

          Having and making friends takes an enormous amount of effort. If you tried to organize an entire class gathering during college the most it would take is a couple posts on Facebook and some Tweeting from the right people. Try doing this 10 years out of college. You have to send letters, plan around thousands of peoples' lives, and double or triple your efforts because chances are most people are now married with a kid or two.

"So Steve, what have you been up to the last 10 years?"

          On the day of graduation you lose the one commonality that made it easy to maintain relationships. As soon as you move off of that campus or community it becomes instantly harder to keep in touch. Without being forced to be around friends you have to make a commitment to be more active on social media, keep a charged phone for 24/7 texting and calling, and somehow keep up with the dozens of close friends it was easy to maintain at college.
          Trying to date someone? Going to parties at college was an easy excuse to show off your mad beer pong skills to impress the guys or girls each weekend but outside of this you have two major options: bars and dating websites. Of course there are many other places to meet people but these are the main two. If you are one of the people who refuses to participate in one or both of these then dating and making friends becomes even harder. It's going to take about 100X more effort to do something that in college you didn't think twice about.

Hard Work is Rewarded

          I cannot tell you how many statuses flooded my Facebook Timeline this first week of break about all the 4.0's and 3.8's my friends and classmates were getting.

Mmmyes. With this 4.0 the theatres will have no choice but to cast me.

           I'm proud of all of them! I am one of those people who thinks that gpa may not matter in the end but the hard work behind them does. For example, I will always think of someone with a 4.0 as a perfectionist while I look at someone with a 3.8 as a person who understands hard work as well as occasional failures. Either way each semester ends and there is a week where you just understand that everyone is going to boast and be proud of how they were rewarded for their perfection with a nice, brand new, shiny letter A on their transcript.

But in reality...

          Hard work is very seldom rewarded in the real world. At least in the same way it is in college. What's the first thing you think of as a reward for hard work in the real world? Right, hookers promotions! Well how many people do you know who work their asses off every day they go to the office? How often do you hear of them or others receiving promotions? The unfortunate thing about the real world is that promotions are few and far between. You may receive yearly reports on how well you're doing but often times these reports apply to the business or office as a whole and not individually.
          We have to become comfortable not being rewarded on every small accomplishment we achieve. We are not going to be graded on every minute "assignment" we turn in at work. This is why self-driven people are some of the most successful. It's because they learn to reward themselves and find happiness in doing the work, not in the results. College is based upon letting you know how well you are doing at every stage in every class. "What's my grade?" "What did you get at midterm?" "What was your final grade?" You constantly know what to work on to get better and if you even need to get better at all. In life you either get promoted, you are stable, or you're fired. And think about how often you hear of promotions and firings.

"Sorry, Mark. Your work hasn't been up to par lately."

 Hard Work is Rewarded by Breaks

          The hard work and perfection we seek is basically one big sprint to the finish line. At no point are we really pacing ourselves in our schoolwork. Professors are always preaching about managing your time so that you can complete assignments by their due dates but when you have 6-8 professors all saying that same thing, what you end up doing is pacing your cram schedule. We sprint from one assignment to the next. Finishing one only to end up pushing our luck on being able to turn in the next assignment on time. It's to the point where I, personally, am not able to motivate myself to do good work unless I do an assignment the night before. And after the big cram and push of finals week is over we are rewarded with a month long break

Finally! I can write that sceenpl... Breaking Bad season 5 is on Netflix!?

          We get used to being able to make these sprints because we know that on the horizon is a complete break from routine that we can hibernate and recuperate during.

But in reality...

          We do not get breaks. We basically trained for a 5K by improving our 40 meter dash. Sure, we may get a week or two of vacation a year but when you consider that during college we get a cumulative 6 months off a year (a 4 month summer break, 1 month Christmas, and 1 month fall break/spring break/holidays), it's pretty hard to adjust to. We will have 5 day work weeks all year long that seem not to be broken up by anything momentous. It can become monotonous and mind-numbing coming straight out of college where the culture is so different and this is what leads many new graduates to feel like they made a mistake in their chosen career path. But this happens to everyone who has gotten used to the college lifestyle. And it is only made worse by the fact that...

Breaks are Ended with Completely New Schedules

          We finished those awful fall term classes and have been rewarded with a month long Christmas break. So now what? We go back to school with an entirely new schedule and daily routine!

"Looks like this semester I'm a rocket scientist!"

          Last semester I had almost exclusively theatre classes. After this Christmas I will be taking almost exclusively science classes to round out my time at UIndy. It doesn't get much more polar than that. So even if I was becoming complacent and bored with the 18 weeks of classes before break, and if I was tired of being up until 4 am and sleeping until 3 pm during break, then I am reinvigorated by what seems like a new life at college!

But in reality...

          There is no change of pace! Especially if you are working a part time job for a couple years. You will be doing essentially the same thing when you leave as when you started with breaks few and far between. This also tends to cause depression for a while for the people not ready to deal with it. The changes of pace we seek will have to be self-implemented if anything. Why do you think so many people "treat themselves to drinks"? But we need to accept the idea that we will be expected to do the same thing for years on end.

"Please kill us. Just let us die for the love of God."

          But if everything goes according to our life plans we will always be working ourselves into new positions and jobs that allow us to work our way up the ladder of success. And speaking of plans...

Perfect Plans Are Easy to Follow

          The first day of welcome week my freshman year at UIndy I was given the curriculum I needed to follow to get my degree. If I took the exact classes I was told to take then in 4 years I would graduate with a degree. Professors were always telling us to make four year plans in order to keep our college careers on track. Each class gives out a syllabus on the first day and the professor explains the plan you need to follow to get an A in their class.

"And if you make it through theatre history without killing yourself you'll get 5 extra credit points."

 But in reality...

          Creating and following perfect plans is extremely difficult and unrealistic. At least creating a relatively concrete plan. The best and most efficient plans to follow are vague and hypothetical. Anyone ever ask you, "Where do you see yourself in 5 years?" They ask because when it comes to life outside of education this is as specific as you can be without setting yourself up for failure. If you try to be more specific than this then you are denying the unpredictability of life. Because even though you are expected to do the same job for years, have little to no breaks, seldom be rewarded, and not have much time for making friends, life tends to find ways to throw a wrench in these expectations. Ask anyone you know outside of college and they will tell you how life turned out very different than anything they ever planned. 

"I never would have imagined I'd be loved by tens of people"

          And that's ok! Unpredictability adds some excitement to what would otherwise be a depressingly stagnant lifestyle outside of college. But we have to be open to this or else we will pigeon-hole ourselves into a job we did not want for the rest of our lives.
          College is great and I have loved my time at UIndy but the closer I get to graduation the more I realize that the culture I have been accustomed to for the past four years is insanely ephemeral and does not exist anywhere else. Because I am so at home at college this idea has made me uncomfortable lately but it is a situation everyone else in my shoes will have to deal with eventually. Change is not a bad thing at all, but no one said it was easy. In fact going from college to the real world is pretty freaking difficult.