College in a nutshell: study, eat, try to sleep, study, call your mom, football, study, shower, Netflix, study, attempt to workout, study, have a social life, and just keep on studying.
It seems like college is a never-ending cycle of stress and exhaustion, but it is also supposed to be the best time of your life, right?
College is hard. Anyone who tells you differently is probably just trying to make you feel better. We are expected to “find ourselves” and maintain a more than decent GPA while staying plugged in to campus social life. Oh and for my fellow freshmen out there, we are trying to defy the “Freshman 15.”
Now stay with me here, there will be days of doubt and days of discouragement. There will be nights where our brains feel like exploding and weekends filled with reading. At the end of the day though, we think to ourselves,
Why am I putting myself through this?
There are responsibilities piled on top of responsibilities, and sometimes we question what our purpose is here. Are we sacrificing various nights of sleep because we want an A on our World Culture exams? Are we going through the rigor of the BIC to improve our applications for future opportunities? Are we doing everything we need to be doing for our futures?
The answer to all of those questions is probably yes. There is also nothing wrong with the answer being “yes.” We are all here to succeed and we are all here for our futures.
The only issue here is that we are so busy chasing the future that we often forget about the now. Yes, college requires us to endure coursework for specific majors plus the BIC requirements, and that is inevitable. What is not inevitable is the way we perceive our lives as college students.
Instead of thinking about college as this trek through Aristotle’s On Rhetoric, we should embrace the opportunity to thrive in a community that encourages us to grow academically, emotionally, and spiritually. This community is the BIC.
We are students, and we are all on our individual journeys. Some of us are pre-med students while others are pursuing an English major or even a business degree. We all have goals and we all have priorities, but sometimes our priorities get lost in the jumble that is college.
We are here for each other. We are here to achieve our own goals and our own dreams. Now although there are parameters that surround every goal, whether it is a certain GPA or an extensive list of credentials, we are all capable of overcoming the obstacles lying before us.
We must not lose motivation, because we are pursuing the future. Those futures will change the world. As we strive to be doctors, lawyers, businessmen, professional writers, and a million other professions, we are all working toward our futures to make an impact in this world. At the end of the day, the hardships we are going through now will serve as a blessing and a benefit down the road.
The next time you sit in a BIC large group, or any class at Baylor for that matter, look around you. Every thought coursing through your head is probably running through your neighbor’s as well. Whether it is the next New York Times assignment or the next biology test, everyone on campus is riding the same wave.
This wave that I’m talking about is not a wave of frustration or stress, although that is a part of the ride, it is a wave of world changers. It is a wave that will bring a global impact, from doctors working in impoverished countries to businessmen heading the next big empire. There is potential everywhere around us, and we cannot let our stress cloud the pathways to our future.
“Yesterday is history, tomorrow is a mystery, today is a gift of God, which is why we call it the present.”
Kassie Hsu is a freshman BIC student majoring in neuroscience.