Who am I? by Desiree

Who am I? by Desiree - August 2019 Scholarship Essay

Doctors and lawyers. These two professions would have to be the most common careers that a teen planning to go to college would say. But why is that? Why is it, that everybody else seems to have their plans all laid out for them while I'm bawling my eyes out over here like the poor, future college student I am? Why do I feel such an overwhelming feeling of seclusion because I don't have a plan for what I want to do? What's wrong with me?

These are questions I often ask myself at random points in the day when I begin thinking of how I'm going to pay for college and my purpose of even going when I have no concrete plans of what I want to do with my life. There's so much pressure. Pressure that I place on myself because I don't want to go through ten different majors in one year, but I also don't want to be the kid that remains undecided until the last possible moment. I'll be the kid that most parents pray they don't have. The kid that already has no way to pay for college and is now wasting even more time by going in undecided and frankly, lost. Then let's not forget the pressure I get from my parents. The two people that think they're being super supportive yet are simultaneously pressuring me to just hurry up and pick a major so they don't have to worry about if I have my life figured out or not. I get it though. Really, I do. Picking a major and figuring out the next twenty years of my life might make other things easier for me, and at the end of the day I know they only want me to be happy and successful but I wish they'd understand that this is real life.

Real life. Wow, it's really hard for me to comprehend sometimes but this really isn't a movie. One day, I'm not going to wake up and that'll be the end; just an endless sea of nothingness. But I think that's what makes it easier for me to accept that I don't have everything planned out. It's okay to take my time and figure out what I really enjoy doing because I know it'll be something that I could do for the rest of my life. One day I'll be able to make something my career instead of just having a job that I cry about constantly but cope with because this world strives on money and finances.

I guess that's the beauty of a gap year because let's be honest, my main concern should be to ensure that I get the most out of college. Taking a gap year would mean I get to figure myself out. After all, I'm only eighteen years old and although I'm technically an adult, which is misconstrued as me suddenly knowing every detail there is to know about myself, I have so much more to learn. I could use a gap year to figure out who I truly am and what I want to become. I could figure out what activities really make me tick versus the ones that I only do because I'm trying to make someone else happy. I could come up with more concrete ideas as to what I want to study in college so that I can get a taste of a few things that I know I enjoy instead of trying every major that exists because I have no clue.

And let's not forget the money. I'm sure plenty of people can relate to not having the funds necessary to put themselves through college. A gap year would allow me to change that. It would mean that not only can I explore different career paths but I can get a job or two and guarantee that I can afford to go to college without graduating with hundreds of thousands of dollars of debt. The point is, so many people view a gap year as an easy way out. They think that because someone is taking a year off from school that they're just getting lazy, but in reality, taking a gap year would allow me to finally figure out who I want to become.