For most of you it is February going on March. For anyone who is a senior, I’m sure you’ll agree when I say that it feels more like it’s February going on May. Every day feels like it’s the end, and yet you can’t help but revel in memories of when you encountered this day at Scripps for the first time four short years ago. It’s a beautiful schizophrenia we live in as seniors. I’m coming to learn, however, that spring of senior year in college feels a lot more bittersweet than it did in high school. Around this time in high school, we all knew that we had gotten into Scripps and choose to attend. We had planned next steps, and we could truly relax and enjoy our final moments in high school.
In college, however, I’m coming to find that senior spring can be one of the most stressful semesters of your college career. Yes, I am really excited about graduating and moving on to that next chapter in my life, but for some, including myself, just finding the title to this next chapter, let alone what its contents will be can be sickening. And let somebody ask me one more time about what I’m doing after graduation… I can’t even finish the thought.
We’re all either applying for jobs and fellowships, and hearing back, or in some cases, not hearing back. And it is this latter part that can really start to eat away at one’s self-confidence…especially if our peers are fairing far better in landing post grad opportunities.
Unfortunately, rejection is a part of life that we’re not trained how to handle well. So for this week’s blog post, I wanted to help students think about alternative ways to view and handle this daunting new chapter ahead. This is dedicated to all my seniors in the struggle.
It was January 28th around 3pm that I got the email. I could have opened it the minute I saw it, but my finger just lingered over my phone screen, paralyzed with fear. If this email did not have what I wanted to see, what I had planned so hard to see, then the perfect two year plan that I had devised for myself was about to become the next four months of chaos.
Dear Daysha,
We regret to inform you…
Ah. The infamous “We-regret-to-inform-you” speech, the equivalent of the other wildly unpopular “we-need-to-talk” speech in dating (but for professional opportunities), was staring me back in the face like that dreaded text message from your soon-to-be ex.
It was a hard blow to take to my ego but, interestingly enough, I was not angry that I did not receive a Fulbright. It actually felt weird knowing how ok I was. That’s not to say that I did not want it, but as Michelle Bauman, a CMC alumna who was also the keynote speaker for the Women and Leadership Alliance conference last Friday, would say, maybe this rejection was delivered to me as a gift.
In her speech, Bauman, executive turned motivational coach, dared us to rethink the purpose behind the rejections we receive in life. “If the challenge were here for you, not against you,” she asked, “a gift brought here only for the purpose of serving you, what is the opportunity? What is the gift to grow?”
Applying Bauman’s question to my own life, I think that I was not meant to get the Fulbright because I think I am actually meant to take the next year off to devote to my writing. It was an idea that I had been toying around with prior to hearing back from Fulbright, but I was terrified of actually doing it. As Scripps students, I think that it can feel daunting to go a non-traditional route after graduation when we’re constantly bombarded with pressure from our families and society to get a “real” job.
However, as Bauman so eloquently stated in her speech, “we have to look for the opportunities where we fold up like a pretzel… and use it as an opportunity for growth; an opportunity for transformation.” For me that came in the form of a playwriting competition, which I can proudly say I won, and has only reinforced my decision to do a self-designed writing fellowship (self-designing…such a Scrippsie, right?) So I would say if there’s something that you’ve been pondering about doing post-graduation, but it scares you. It forces you to step outside yourself and take a risk, then do it. If you’re wildly successful at it, you’ll be forever grateful that you took the risk. But if it doesn’t go as planned, remember that there is a gift there for you begging to be opened and put to use.