5 Things I Wish I Did Differently As An Undergrad

Though the photo on my LinkedIn page is a selfie from my freshman year of college in my first dorm room, I am now a rising senior. As I approach my final two semesters of my undergraduate studies, I look back on my experience and I wish I had done several things differently. All of my experiences have taught me something about myself, but if I had the opportunity to re-do my undergraduate years then I definitely would. But, since time travel is impossible, I’d like to share some of the things that I would change with other incoming college freshmen and hopefully some high school seniors.

Location, Location, Location

This one is definitely more for high school seniors (sorry freshmen), but during your college search and right before you commit to a school, really think about where you’ll be spending the next four years away from home.

If you’re someone who’s thinking of moving out of their home-state then I implore you to read this until the end. Like many young people, I romanticized the idea of moving out of the suburbs to New York City and living my best “Friends” life. But, living in New York as a financially independent adult is much different than living as a 17-year-old college student fresh out of high school. The location of a school is not simply the place where you go to classes, but it comes with its own culture and environment that can impact the way that you spend your years at that school. The location of your undergraduate studies may also be a contender for where you ultimately decide to lay down roots outside of your home state. As much as I’ve grown to love New York City, choosing a school in such a place meant that I was sacrificing a lot of traditional college experiences that I didn’t think that I would miss out on: spirit weeks, homecoming games, quirky school traditions (one school I applied to kicked off spirit activities by waking students up with pots and pans), plus the fact that there are many commuter students who come and go from campus.

Move outside of your comfort zone, but truly consider whether you can see yourself living the next 4+ years in a place before committing. Consider the culture outside of your school and whether it’s the type of place that you think you could grow to feel at home and if you’ll be okay missing out on certain parts of college. Every school is different and a huge part of that is where they are located.

Electives Are Important Too

The word “requirements” probably makes you think that those are the classes you need to prioritize, but electives should not be treated as an afterthought. To be fully candid, I am so serious when I say that you need to spread your classes out evenly. As long as you regularly meet with your advisor and do your research, those requirements will be fulfilled. Electives may be a different beast but that just means there is a beast waiting for you in the end.

Instead of separating classes into categories of “useful” and “useless” choose the elective courses that have transferable skills within your field of interest. On that note, embrace learning new things, even ones that are outside of your field of study. One course that I frequently avoided (apologies to my professor if she’s reading this) ended up being one of my favorites; Performing Shakespeare. On the surface, I expected it to be a class where I could just have fun doing theatre games and acting out scenes (which it was) but it also wound up being a great way of learning how to successfully work on a group project (building scenes and later a play), public speaking (reciting lines), and helped me form a community even if it was just for a semester.

Don’t let course names deter you and look at the course description to find the skills that this course could teach you. It shows open-mindedness and could even make for a unique story to share during an interview that makes you stand out from other applicants.

Talk to Your Professors First

This sounds like a given, but if you find yourself in a relatively smaller (less than 20-person) class then make a habit of talking to your professors for suggestions on what classes to take and career advice. While you should definitely stay in touch with your advisor and do your own research regarding degree requirements, it is so helpful to speak with professors, especially those who teach and work within your field of study. 

The cool thing about a lot of professors is the fact that many of them are working within or have working knowledge of the industry that you are trying to break into. They may also be alumni of your school, so ask them about the courses that they had taken during their undergraduate years or their suggestions on what to take after their classes.

Professors can help steer you in the direction of developing your interests or skills in a subject rather than only prioritizing the fulfillment of requirements. Basically, don’t only care about fulfilling requirements, and remember that college is also a time for academic and career exploration.

Accept That Friends Come and Go

In high school, I met my friend group almost immediately, and we still get together whenever we all come home at the same time. During my orientation, I did meet a few people that I got along really well with, and I thought that making friends in college was going to be just as easy as it was before.

Over the past three years, I’ve met friends both in classes and from my summer job. Some of them have only lasted as far as a semester, and others I’ve thankfully stayed in touch with. These friends I may not see that often because of busy schedules, but that’s okay. I still have my high school friends, and our group chat is still just as active now as it was back then. For a long time, I felt guilty for not instantly forming the same kind of group in college, but at the same time, I really like having my alone time. I appreciate every one of my friendships regardless of how long they lasted. I like that I can say “hi” to different people when passing them in the halls or between buildings. I like that even if I may not be friends with people, I still know them and feel comfortable enough speaking to them.

College is nothing like the movies and TV shows make it out to be, but the college experience was never meant to be monolithic.

It IS Possible to Know Everything at 18 and Nothing at 22

I want to preface this by saying that I don’t regret my decision to major in English. To be completely blunt, things were going really well my freshman year; I had landed a well-paying internship that aligned with my career goals and I had a short-term summer job lined up as well. Because of this positive trajectory, I (naively) believed that it meant the pipeline towards landing a job after graduation would be smooth sailing. Adding to that belief was the fact that there were plenty of editorial, copywriting, and journalism internships and staff writer positions popping up on my Handshake and LinkedIn pages just begging for me to submit applications. Furthermore, I was part of a career services program that allowed me to apply for internships with organizations that partnered with our school (despite how this story ends, see if your school has anything similar and get in IMMEDIATELY). But the next summer, my old internship didn’t re-hire me, opting to rotate interns instead.

Other internships had similarly replied late, informing me of their decisions to hire a different candidate. Luckily, I still had my summer job working as a camp counselor for a pre-college program. The pay wasn’t as good as last summer, but I was still grateful to have something that provided me with job experience. Then, just before this summer break, right when I had already accepted the position again, I found out that the program I had worked in was cancelled. To add salt to the wound, internships that I had applied for way back in April and May did not get back to me until late June and early July, only to let me know that my applications were not moving forward. It also didn’t help that one of my professors said it seemed likely that we were graduating into a recession. 

I took a step back and looked at everything I was doing; regularly applying to jobs I thought I would be a good fit for, applying for internships at professors’ places of work, going to career service events, working on my LinkedIn profile, but nothing. And then one day after learning about a federal hiring freeze and summer break approaching without any internships, I realized that I didn’t know as much as I did when I was 17.

I was forcing myself to apply for jobs that I was barely interested in and looking for classes that I simply thought would look good on my resume. The plan, which I thought was fool-proof, wound up being unfortunately vulnerable to things out of my control. My mother had frequently encouraged me to look into graduate schools (read: law or medical school), but back when I had jobs, I saw graduate school as a sign of defeat. A way of letting the world know that I couldn’t land a job directly out of college. I knew plenty of people who were going for Master’s programs, and it wasn’t because they didn’t have anything to look forward to. They enrolled in graduate programs because they loved what they studied, wanted to gain more skills, and spend more time learning about this subject that they really didn’t get to spend a lot of time with.

4 years sounds like a lot but when you factor in things like core curriculum requirements, degree requirements, and elective courses, you find that you don’t really get as much time with your major as you thought. And there’s the simple fact that sometimes a graduate degree does (unfortunately) help when navigating the job market.

This isn’t to say that graduate school or programs are for everyone, but there really is no telling what could happen even if you did do everything right. Be open to changing courses or interests because by the time you get to your senior year, you won’t be the same person that you were as a freshman. Have backup plans and be open to changes that you may or may not have expected. None of it means that you failed.