Hello Scripps!! Welcome back to campus! I hope everyone is settling in and getting excited for an amazing semester. I will be off campus, studying abroad in Dublin, Ireland this fall and am very excited to blog about my experiences there. In addition to blogging about my time abroad, I will be blogging about my experiences this summer. I am a chemistry major and physics is one of the many requirements needed to graduate. I knew that I wouldn’t have room for it in my schedule during the school year, so I decided to take it over the summer. In addition to this summer class, I worked three different jobs, that have given way to several new potential career paths that I’m excited to share. Even though this summer was full of new experiences, I am feeling just as unsure as ever about what my path will be after graduation. In this first post, I wanted to discuss how I’ve been dealing with this uncertainty and how I think that, in many ways, it’s actually a good thing.

Ever since I was in elementary school, I can remember talking about college with my parents. It was always something I had heard about, knowing that it was something that would likely make getting a job easier and would help me financially. I knew that it was a part of my future and that my parents would support me in getting there. When I was a sophomore in high school, my family and I visited colleges during our Thanksgiving vacation and again during spring break of my junior year. By the fall of my senior year, I was applying to colleges, talking about my top choices, and what it would be like once I was on campus. I was always ready to go off to college and that plan was always secure in my mind. I realize, now that I am not so certain about my future, that I really latched onto this plan. It became something that I never had to worry about because I already knew what was going to happen.

As the summer is coming to an end, I find myself questioning the classes I’ve taken while at Scripps, the major I’ve chosen, and the path I will take in the future. Having a future that is so wide open is a new experience for me, and not one that I am particularly comfortable in. As of right now, I am trying to be okay with the fact that I have no solidified plans for myself. The world is my oyster, as they say. I know for a fact that I would not have had many of the experiences and job opportunities I had this summer if I hadn’t been open to the idea of trying something new. That is the best piece of advice I can give anyone in college, and the best advice I can give myself: be open to trying new things. Although it may sound cliche, there are so many opportunities that college will present to you, and it’s important to take advantage of as many as you can. You really never know what you’ll like until you try it.