Emily Hoeven | Back to the future

Growing Pains | On embracing the uncertain

By Emily Hoeven 12/01/15 12:23am

I’ve been telling people that I want to be a writer since I was in elementary school. I always thought of college as the place where I would be able to actualize that dream, and I didn’t waste any time upon arriving at Penn: I jumped into English classes, determined to improve my critical writing and become more well-read. I decided to join several literary magazines, in love with the idea that I could be a writer for a publication that was designated as “literary.” Weren’t these, after all, the steps one took on the conventional path to authorhood? The fast track to the future I wanted so badly? I was ahead of the game.

Or so I thought. When I discovered that some of my peers were already published poets and novelists and had curated gallery exhibits of their art, I began to question the choices I’d made and reevaluate how I was spending my time. Was it more worthwhile to expend all of my energy studying for classes and trying out extracurriculars unrelated to my hopeful future career, or should I primarily focus on the dream I’d had for so long? Was it better to spend hours perfecting my essay for an English class or spend hours working on a novel and attempt to get it published? To concentrate on the present, or to concentrate on the future?

It is true that college is supposed to prepare you for the workforce, and it is also true that in college, you specialize in a certain field of study in order to be prepared to enter that field after graduation. In many ways, college is viewed as a narrowing-down mechanism, where everyone hones in on their unique talent or interest. Yet I sense this fear amongst college students that if we don’t narrow our objectives quickly enough — if we don’t get internships directly related to our future careers each summer or create our own startup at age 20 or become a New York Times bestseller before graduating — we will have lost our chance at success. We fear we won’t be competitive enough in our fields if we don’t make a name for ourselves in those fields before even entering them. And what’s worse is sometimes we let this fear keep us from even beginning. We tell ourselves we’re already too far behind to attempt to catch up.

Because of these fears, I have considered prioritizing the writing of a novel or collection of short stories above my schoolwork and extracurriculars countless times. I have tried to convince myself that in the long run, making progress on those ideas will matter more than a good grade on a neuroscience test completely unrelated to my major, that furthering my writing career is more important than staying up late every Sunday night to discuss funding allocation at student government meetings. But each and every time I shy away from those thoughts because they make me feel pigeonholed. Like I’m compressed in a box that’s a little too small.

Perhaps the issue is I’m not as sure about what I want to do as I was before I came to college. Because of classes I’ve taken here, I have fallen in love with subjects as varied as constitutional law, neuroscience, medieval English poetry, philosophy and linguistics. I have become increasingly unsure as to what combination of things I want to study and what, exactly, it is that I want to accomplish in the future. And this uncertainty made me panic because it made me feel as if I was deviating from the goals I had set for myself and my career.

But shouldn’t college function just as much as a broadening mechanism as it should a narrowing-down mechanism? Isn’t uncertainty part of the point of a liberal arts education? Inherent in discovering the diversity and breadth of what we can learn and experience? Necessary to question our individual status quos? I am 19 years old, and it’s OK if I haven’t accomplished all I’ve set out to do yet. It’s OK if I take my future at my own pace. It’s OK to take some detours on the way — a neuroscience class here, a random activity there. And something tells me that those experiences are not detours at all — that in embracing the necessary nonlinearity and messiness of college, of life, I’ll have a lot to write about in the future.

EMILY HOEVEN is a College sophomore from Fremont, Calif., studying English.  Her email address is ehoeven@sas.upenn.edu. “Growing Pains” appears every other Tuesday.

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