My Addendum to College Commencement Speeches
Welcome to Twenty Something. This column- written by Caitlyn Garrity– explores the uncharted territory called your 20s. It’s funny, it’s witty, it’s honest.
This past Friday, my brother graduated from the University of Minnesota with a B.S. in Sports Management. As the eldest, I’ll never quite be able to describe the feeling of seeing your siblings grow into adults. It’s pretty strange seeing the same person you used to scream at the dinner table walk across the graduation stage in a cap and gown, ready to take on the big, real world.
Graduation season is ending for the spring, and being in the Mariucci stadium with around a thousand graduates was the first time since my graduation that I got to look from the outside in. The feeling in the air was electric with relief and pride, but I could also feel the rumblings of uncertainty and fear from each graduate.
As I listened to the two decorated student speakers, I couldn’t help but notice a pattern in their speeches:
Achieved, achieve, and continue to achieve.
Support systems will be there for you.
Uncharted waters.
You will all do amazing things.
Student speeches motivate and encourage the grads to feel supported as they walk through uncharted territories. Yet, there is a lot of focus on having already found yourself in college, and your next steps are to continue seeking achievement. While these speeches do motivate and inspire–encapsulating a four-year journey– as a grad, I have something else to tell you that might help settle some of your nerves.
Why not put the “achieving” on pause for a bit? If you are a new graduate, chances are you just spent your last four (or more) years of your life achieving, working, and striving for the end goal of graduating. While that is a big goal of higher education, I don’t fully endorse immediately seeking more success. Sure, you’ll need a job to stay afloat, and that might look different depending on your circumstances, but you’re now freshly graduated, likely 22, and still incredibly green to this world. I’m 24 and still feel as clueless as I did when I walked across the stage at my graduation.
Our life is hopefully long, and to think you will have it all figured out by submitting your last marketing final at 22 is incredibly naive. Graduation is just the beginning of your life, for the first time without classes and finals. That could look like building a career right away, but it could also mean learning more about yourself through odd jobs, traveling, and real-life experiences that help shape what you are passionate about. This could also mean landing your “dream job” at 22, only to realize you absolutely hate it or love it… who knows?! I don’t believe in “knowing your purpose” because purposes change with life, but I do believe that there are experiences in life that will tell you a lot more about yourself, and very few of those come from the short few years you spend in a pedagogical vacuum.
Some people spend 10+ years in a career and then, at 45, decide to go to law school. People may go into a “temporary job” at a restaurant only to realize that they love the hospitality business and that college was forced upon them by their parents/families. These are examples of what it looks like not to have it fully “figured out” right after college, and finding purpose through life experience.
Graduating from college is simply graduating from college, something to be celebrated, and something amazing. But graduating from college isn’t a marriage to a career in what you pursued those few years in your late adolescence, and it surely isn’t a deadline to discovering yourself. If you stop trying to understand life and yourself after school, that is the only way you’re making the “wrong choice.”
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