Emily Hoeven | The 'best four years of our lives'

Growing Pains | On learning to embrace the unpredictability of college

By Emily Hoeven 01/30/17 10:30pm

Maybe it’s because I’m graduating from Penn soon, but I’ve been reflecting a lot recently on how I came to be here in the first place. I’ve been thinking about how naturally and easily people say things like “College is the best four years of your life!” and trying to ascertain if my college years have, in fact, been the best years of my life thus far.

The conclusion I have arrived at is two-fold: 1) I would not label my college years as the best years of my life, and 2) this doesn’t mean I “did” college wrong.

When people — often reminiscing adults — say “College is the best four years of your life,” they are referring to things like a general lack of fiscal responsibility, relative independence and the privilege to spend most of one’s time how one wants. College is idealized because it is perceived as the sole time in one’s life when one can experience the perks of adulthood without having to take on the responsibilities of adulthood.

Even if all of this holds true, however, this does not necessarily ensure that college will be the best four years of our lives. There is, in my opinion, a distinction to be made between the concept of college and the reality of college. When we make our college decisions, we choose the place that is conceptually the best for us, but we cannot know in advance if we are actually choosing the place where we’ll be happiest.

We can look at class size, at location, at average graduation rate, at average starting salaries. We can evaluate the strengths and weaknesses of different programs and clubs. But none of this compares to actually attending the school, to experiencing the culture and the day-to-day life firsthand. Reading online that around 25 percent of Penn students participate in greek life leaves one with a very different impression than one gets during New Student Orientation, let alone from walking down Locust on a Thursday night or reading The Round Up section of 34th Street Magazine.

We do not make our college decisions blindly, but we fundamentally make them with blinders on. And when one thinks about it, the defining aspects of our college experiences are themselves variable, and to a certain degree, arbitrary.

The freshman halls we’re placed in, the people we end up meeting, the professors we engage with because of the classes we pick, the three or four extracurriculars we select from hundreds of options — all of these things are choices that we make, yet at the same time they hold within them unpredictable paths, consequences, interactions, chains of events, feelings.

Well, you might say, this isn’t particular to college. It’s just a fact of life. Life is unpredictable, and we can’t always determine the outcomes of our choices.

Yet I believe that the unpredictability of life is a phenomenon especially relevant for college students. We are always, even if subconsciously, comparing grandiose statements like “College is the best four years of your life” or “I met all my best friends in college” to the realities of our college experiences. And our belief that college should live up to all these superlatives — or that achieving these superlatives always lies within our control — prevents us from embracing or adapting to our experiences as they really are.

What makes college both so difficult and so wonderful are the turns and dips and swerves that we either did not expect or would not have necessarily planned for ourselves. We may wonder, at some point or another, “What would my life be like if I went to X or Y college instead? How would my Penn experience be different if I had joined X or Y organization or met X or Y person instead?” When we do this, we understand more fully what it means to be an adult. We wonder what things would have been like if we had made different choices or if the circumstances had been different, yet we simultaneously realize that we have to adapt to, learn from, challenge and embrace the unpredictable and overlapping chains of events that constitute life. And it seems to me that this is an integral part of growing up.

When looked at through this lens, we realize that college is not some monolithic entity that has to be done in a certain way, nor is it the be-all-end-all of our lives. Our college experiences are obviously formative, but we need to assign them the proper amount of weight in relation to the rest of our lives. Penn might provide us with all of our best times, our best friends, our significant others and our future job trajectories, or it might not. And if it doesn’t, that’s okay.

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