i'm now in my last 2 weeks of college (and probably education in general, unless i decide to go back to school at some point later in my life).
i was walking to campus last night and a song that i used to a lot right before i started college (starting over by chris stapleton) started playing. that's the first time it's actually hit me that college is almost over and i'm about to properly start my adult life.
since then, i've been thinking a lot about how the version of me that started college is different from the version of me now, that's about to exit. without a doubt, i've changed and grown as an individual physically, mentally, skillset-wise, etc. but i've begun to wonder if that's what i was actually looking out of college.
my goals coming in
i actually spent a lot of time pondering what i wanted to accomplish while i was in college during my last semester of high school. at the time, i felt kind of lost and directionless. throughout high school, i had been on the pre-med track, but if i was being honest with myself i knew that i didn't have a passion for it. i was basically just following it because i was able to achieve high test scores / results in it, and my brother was a pre-med at the time so i was just following in his footsteps the way i had been academically for most of my life.
however, looking at him and how passionate he was about medicine and the field of healthcare had made me realize that this wasn't something i was actually deeply interested in. (i'm even more glad looking back now that i came to that realization then, because looking at him now that he's in med school, his passion has only grown and i don't think that one can survive & thrive in a climate as tough as med school without that level of intrinsic love for what they do). at the same time, one of my friends had been pushing me to try coding / software development, and in the limited exposure i had to it i found myself really enjoying it.
i found myself at a crossroads where i had to choose between sticking with pre-med, which felt like the easier and 'safer' option and one that i had the most prior experience with, or switching to computer science which i knew pretty much nothing about but found myself enjoying although i was really bad at it.
in the end, i (obviously) came to the decision to pursue cs. what ended up swaying the needle for me was a point my friend made that really stuck with me. as a doctor, i had the ability to provide support and be a pillar for my patients. a significant impact, for a significant, non-zero number of people. but the true medium for affecting change in the current world is technology. if i made something impactful enough, i had the opportunity to leverage tech to change the lives of people all across the globe.
i found myself staying up thinking about all the problems in the world that could be solved. all the things i had noticed, all the things i wished had been different about my experience growing up and even problems within fields like healthcare. i frankly hadn't even fully realized or comprehended the amount of money it was possible to make in the field, work life balance, etc. and all the stereotypical pros of tech that people generally point to as reasons to pursue it (although i'm definitely not complaining about them now ;) ).
the driving factor for me was pretty much unilaterally about building things that help people. i wanted to make the world a better place, and that's truly what excited me about cs. to that end, i wanted to leverage college as an opportunity to build up my completely lacking skillset and get to the point where i could actually build anything i wanted, as a means to accomplish that goal.
what i did in college
when i came in, i was pretty much immediately made acutely aware that i didn't really know what i was doing. cs was hard for me. and although i had a cursory understanding going in that it would be something i don't know much about, to be frank that was pretty difficult to accept and actually experience.
as a result, my priorities subconciously started shifting slightly. i was still obsessed with learning how to build things, and i got to do exactly that through really cool opportunities like la hacks, where i got accepted as a software developer despite not really knowing how to code and learned most of my foundational knowledge for frontend development. while that overarching goal was there, it got replaced in the short term by a more micro-level goal of doing well in my cs classes, studying properly, learning c++/oop, etc.
that grind eventually morphed into what every cs major's career trajectory ends up looking like. i started hearing buzz about how it's time to start applying for internships and the recruiting process from my peers. so i started doing that too. i applied to internships, went through recruiting processes, and eventually ended up as in intern at a startup that had previously gone through y combinator.
to be clear, these are all good things. finding an internship is a good thing. learning c++ and object-oriented programming is a good thing. however, at some point i feel like i began to lose track of the overarching goals i had walked in with. getting an internship turned into a short term success that made me feel good, and made me look at the next step as getting a better internship. the focus started shifting away from learning, developing my skillset, and leveraging that to build things that improve the world, and more into micro-level career development and personal growth for me as an individual.
reflecting
honestly, the last two days i've been thinking a lot about this mindset shift. i realize i've kind of stopped thinking about the same things that i was thinking about when i came in. what started as a set of micro-goals that were intended to be a means to an end for achieving what i wanted at a high level, ended up basically becoming the whole goal.
i've been generally feeling pretty good about the spot i'm at. i have a full time job after i graduate, i've met really incredible people and learned a lot about the startup and professional world, and i've accomplished a lot of the personal, financial, and social goals i had for myself. i'm definitely more confident and self assured and less fearful than i was coming in. i also look very different (hopefully in a good way).
but if i take a step back and reflect honestly, i don't know if the version of me that came into college would have put as much weight into any of those accomplishments as i'm giving them now. while all of those things are incredible blessings, and i'm very grateful for them, i do feel looking back that i may have gotten so caught up in the weeds that i started letting short term gratification make me feel like i've "made it" or i'm accomplishing everything i wanted to.
walking out of college now, i share a lot of the same goals i did coming in. i still want to build. and at a root level, i still feel that making things that better peoples' lives is the driving motivation for me. and honestly, i feel like while i made a lot of personal development, some of the clarity i had towards that goal got lost along the way.
while i'm overall happy with the growth i made, i'm not satisfied when i reflect back at my root level motivations for going down this path and doing what i did. as i start my adult life, i want to make a more conscious effort to continue growing personally, but not losing sight of what is really driving me. i don't want to feel like i've "made it" or i'm accomplishing all my goals, until i've accomplished what i actually set out to do: building something from nothing and making something with enough impact to change lives.