Written by: Aleksandra Lyanskaya

You know those few weeks before graduation day where all you can think about is getting through finals and finally walking across that stage and receiving your diploma? Along with a piece of paper, for which you spent four years working on, in hand, it’s time to get all your friends together for celebratory drinks. Oddly enough, the one thing not all of us think about is where in this world we will go to after moving out of our dorm rooms, our five-roommate houses, our college towns where we’ve set up four years of our lives. So once we’ve payed the biggest guys we know on campus a nice six pack of beer for them to carry our beds and dressers down the stairs, gotten someone willing enough to help us drive all of our things back to our parents’ house, there we are, sitting in our childhood bedrooms. Now what? Where to go? Who to work for? What in the world to do? Decisions, decisions. Well, seeing as just about everyone has made it in life; whether it was sticking with their plan of never leaving their hometown, working a million jobs to afford rent, traveling and exploring the world and all it entails, or finding the career they love. I guess the time has come for those of us who have recently graduated or are on the track coming close to that time in life. No matter where we decide to go, what we decide to do, we just have to know, understand, and mainly believe that it will all work out for each and every one of us.

Backtracking, back in high school, we were told to set up a five year plan, something that would get us on some kind of track to knowing what college we’d be attending in the next few years or at least where we’d be going. A portfolio we thought would be the answer to everything if we were able to present it to five other individuals from the community alongside our teachers and peers. However, looking back, being brave enough to stand in front of this group of people for eight minutes telling them our hopes and dreams didn’t happen to be the answer after all. We’ve all been taught to fake it until you make it. No matter how much we try and learn from our past, procrastination will always be a go-to, with the adrenaline rush and knowing that we’ll have to accomplish something or other in the end, we’re constantly pushing ourselves to strive for whatever the future holds for us. We just have to keep stepping, one foot at a time, to whatever beat that pushes us forward.