Decisions and Milestones

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Hey students,

As a sophomore, I feel as though I have reached a fork in the road with my academic career. Many other students like me probably also feel this. As with any major, there comes a time to decide what you want to do with that degree and what field you want to enter. After all, I am deciding what I want to study and do the rest of my life at nineteen…and I seriously hope I’m making the right decision so far. With that huge responsibility, comes a lot of indecisiveness.

There are a lot of questions I have, such as do I want to make money and get a job straight out of school? Do I want to apply for graduate school? Or my nightmare: take a few years off before applying to graduate school to work and make some money, but not be able to find a job, and have to move back in with my parents and work at Starbucks or something to pay off my ridiculous private school debt.

In two and half years, we will (us sophomores at least) have to make some big decisions that, to me seem too far away. I wish someone told me my freshman year to start buckling down a little more and at least apply for a few internships or something. As a whole, the attitude of freshman year was a blend of feeling grateful you were done with high school, and embodying the ‘let’s get wasted’ persona because it was expected of us from each other on some level socially. Maybe you didn’t drink at all, but either way, freshman year was about making friends and getting adjusted to the college experience. It wouldn’t have hurt to be a little more proactive in exploring career options, or post USF options in general though.

For me, all I wanted in coming to college was to have the chance to be more than the cashier at the local grocery store in my hometown (not kidding, that was one of my first actual jobs). I just hope that at the end of these two and half years I will have a better idea of what that will look like and start trying to be as prepared for graduation as possible.

I know I do have some control over what will happen after the next two and half years. There are internships, more job experience, and research opportunities I can shoot for. People have been telling me that as a sophomore, asking these questions now is probably better than to start wondering about all this your Junior year, or even your Senior year. It’s better to be proactive and start applying for internships or whatever else now, and learning from that experience, than it is to be applying for your first internship your senior year. Procrastination, while it has gotten the better of me most nights I do homework, won’t do me much good on my four year track to the “real world”. 

Thanks for reading,

Elaine Ortega