There’s so much I wish I had known before going into college. Not because I didn’t get advice—I received so much advice, and most of it ended up being garbage. But that’s the point of college, isn’t it? To find yourself and figure out what you want, not what the thousands of voices surrounding you are telling you you should want.

I’ve compiled a list of advice I, as a senior, would give myself if I were to do everything all over again—advice I wish I’d heard instead of what I actually got. Some of it might be contrarian—intentionally so! I hope this helps even one person find their footing a little faster and feel a little less alone :)

1. things will not go according to plan 

If there were one universal truth I could give you to summarize the college experience, it would be this. You’re fresh out of high school. You’ve spent 18 or so years with your life laid out for you. If you’ve had any choice in your education, it is likely to have been about which level of physics to take or which teacher to swap. You probably lived with your parents or other people who wouldn’t let you do just whatever you wanted, people who put restrictions on how you spent your time and when you went out and what you ate for dinner every night.

College is a liberation. All of a sudden, you’re given complete control over nearly every aspect of your life—it might be your first time living away from home. It’s almost certainly your first time having so much agency over your education. But this liberation is also daunting, because no 18-year-old really knows what they’re doing.

It’s so tempting to cope with having real freedom for the first time by making four-year plan after four-year plan after four-year plan. To help you feel in control, you might map out all the courses you’ll take, or all the clubs you’ll join, or all the research you’ll do, or the job you’ll have after graduation. These might lead into each other—your investments class will help you break into the investments club which will help you break into investment banking.

Here’s the kicker, though: I guarantee you that nothing will happen as you’ve imagined it. A class you were really looking forward to will suck or not be offered the year you were planning on taking it. You won’t get that club officer position. Professors will go on sabbatical at the most inconvenient times. You’ll get rejected from jobs over and over and over again, until a search for “We regret to inform you” in your email inbox highlights hundreds of hits in a row. 

Almost nobody I knew in freshman year is doing what they thought they were going to be doing. Some of it is personal—people decided they just don’t enjoy a field of study as much as they thought they would. But a lot of it is just firmly outside your control. As an example, the recent political targeting of universities has made all of my academia-bound friends reconsider their options, and the recent cancellation of Brown’s concurrent master’s programs has sent many of my friends flailing. Right now, nobody can get the jobs that they want. 

You don’t know what the future will look like four years from now. If you believe that statement, believe this, too: There is no value in making long-term decisions at this point in your life. Instead, treat everything like an explorer. Seek out people who interest you, not because you want to become them, but because you’re interested in what you can learn from them. Take classes not because they’re potentially useful for your career, but because they might teach you something interesting and lead you in unexpected directions. Every time you decide to do something, ask yourself why. If your main answer has anything to do with the fact that it might help you become a specific person or do a specific thing, and not because you think it’ll teach you something new or interesting about yourself or the world, don’t do it.

Instead, embrace the uncertainty. Try out all sorts of things. Take unexpected opportunities as they come. You go to one of the most exploratory and academically progressive colleges in the United States: Use that to your advantage!

2. you will miss out, and you will have to be okay with it

You’re at Brown—it’s probably a safe assumption to make that you’re an overachiever with too many interests and a desire to take on the world. 

But you can’t take on the world. There’s too much going on at once. In all likelihood, you probably won’t even be able to take on all the classes you decided to take and all the clubs you decided to join and all the social meetups you agreed to on your Google Calendar. 

The hardest part of college, in my experience, is figuring out what to prioritize. The old cliche of only being able to choose two out of sleep, friends, and school has largely held true for me. You feel like you want to do everything because you fear missing out on something life-changing, but at the cost of your health and at the risk of burnout. You want to fill every nook and cranny of your schedule, maybe just to appear busy or to tell other people how busy you are, or because you see everyone around you up to such amazing things, and you don’t think you can compare. 

The world will keep spinning if you decide not to do something. If you have a tough midterm at 9 a.m. tomorrow, it’s okay to say no to dinner with your floormates tonight—your floormates, and the restaurants on Thayer for that matter, will be there for you another day. If you’re already going to be juggling a part-time job and three tough classes, it’s okay to not add a fourth class in archaeology because you found it mildly interesting—archaeology will always exist, but protecting your peace now is more important. The hard truth is that if you overcommit, like I did the past couple of semesters in a row, you’ll find that in the end, you did not put enough into your commitments to learn from them in the first place. 

Finding your balance is hard. I still haven’t quite figured it out yet. But don’t let anyone convince you that you’re not doing enough, because you are! Remind yourself that there’s plenty of learning and growing to be had after college, too; you don’t have to cram everything into these four years.

3. everything matters less than you think it does

As a freshman, you may feel like every single decision is going to define the rest of your life. I get it. I remember feeling this way. I agonized over whether or not I should S/NC my intro econ class, or whether I should take an English class instead of a history class, or whether I should go to the semesterly Cheese Club meeting instead of rehearsal.

The truth is that very little of this actually matters. I think back on my freshman year and imagine where I’d be if I’d made the other decision. It’s not difficult—I’d be right where I am now. 

Try not to get hung up on the little things. It doesn’t matter if you can make that lunch talk. It doesn’t matter whether that professor honors your regrade request or what grade you get on that midterm. It doesn’t matter whether you get an A or a B or an S in an elective. It doesn’t even matter if you get a B or a C in your major—you’re a freshman; you’re taking intro-level courses that have very little to do with what you’ll do in the future. It doesn’t matter if you can’t get into VISA 100 your first semester, or if you pick Professor Smith over Professor Jones in MATH 100, or if you don’t get an internship this summer.

It’s difficult to see because everything you do now constitutes such a large percentage of your college experience. But trust me—take everything that will happen to you in the next month or so, and scale your expectations of it down by about a factor of three. You have so much time left. Even if you do make a mistake now, or you don’t like the way things are going for you, there are so many opportunities to adjust.

4. there is no correct answer

You might be feeling the pressure to figure out exactly what to do with your life. It feels like all of your classmates have dream jobs or dream concentrations or know exactly what field of research they want to go into for their Ph.D.s. The way our society frames adulthood, there’s this notion that there is a correct path—a job that you’re meant to do, a question that you’re meant to answer, all things you’ve worked toward since you were a child.

Don’t waste your time looking for a correct answer. There isn’t one. No one is meant to be an accountant or an engineer or a journalist, and I think convincing yourself otherwise is a waste of time and your own potential. No adult really has it figured out either. You have the capacity to contain multitudes; don’t restrict yourself to the limited subset of the world you know about.

Instead, keep your mind open and invite possibilities, even if it’s not what you quite expected. The best career advice I’ve gotten has nothing to do with my skills or my values: Be opportunistic and take advantage of whatever comes your way. There is no other way to go through life.

This is scary to realize; having a concrete goal to work towards simplifies your life quite drastically. But if you’re like me, and you have a million interests and sudden hyperfixations bouncing around your head, know that you don’t have to choose—you just have to let things choose you and not get too hung up on why. Don’t rush! You’ll figure things out about yourself, little by little, and you just have to trust the process.

5. go outside

If you’re feeling overwhelmed, or sad, or stuck, the number one thing that helps me is also something that’s shockingly accessible. Go outside! Fall and spring are beautiful on campus, and there are so many benches where you can do work beneath the cherry blossoms or hang out with the baby bunnies. Staying connected to your surroundings is so important but so easy to forget when you’re absorbed in your world of study-class-homework-repeat.

I don’t just mean go outside as in leave your dorm and enjoy the outdoors. I also mean leave campus. Take the RIPTA somewhere—it’s free! Go downtown to watch Waterfire, or window shop at a crafts store, or hang out at the RISD library. Providence has so much to offer if you’re willing to leave College Hill once in a while. And if Providence is ever feeling too small for you, you can take the commuter rail to Boston or the RIPTA to Newport or, if you’re feeling adventurous one weekend, the Amtrak to New York. Take a deep breath of fresh air and remind yourself that the world is bigger than your commitments.

6. ask for help 

Lastly, ask for help; you can’t make this journey alone. This may look like a lot of things—if you’re sick and you don’t feel well enough to complete your work, please go to Health Services instead of assuming you can tough out your illness. If you don’t know how to complete your assignment, go to office hours instead of bashing your head against the wall staring at the same problem for three hours. There is so much support on this campus—the Curricular Resource Center, for one, offers academic coaching and drop-in academic advising hours. The Sheridan Center for Teaching and Learning offers free tutoring. The Writing Center can help you with your papers. The Center for Career Exploration offers career counseling and mentorship programs during breaks. If you need help with something more serious, all of the academic deans are available to meet one-on-one.

These are just the university resources. Depending on who you are and what you want, there are so many people you can reach out to. Your professors have mentorship written in their job description, and presumably you have a helpful Meiklejohn whose entire job is to help you transition into college. If you’re underrepresented in a field, there’s probably a club that offers mentorship and community for you. And, of course, your peers are going through this transition the same way you are, and older students may have already experienced what you need help with. Don’t feel afraid or too proud to take advantage of any of these resources; the people around you want you to succeed.

❈

Four years later, I still have no idea what I want to do after I graduate. My transcript and resume are still incoherent. I never “figured it out”—I just walked in circles a bit more. But the difference now is that I’m more okay with not knowing, and I try to take things a little less seriously. Everything still feels very uncertain, but I’m less worried about things I can’t control.

These are things I wish I knew as a first-year, but they are things I still have to remind myself of now. It’s hard! But I know that you will have a wonderful four years ahead of you if you let yourself enjoy it. Good luck—we are all rooting for you :)