Today I finished the last presentation and the last major course of my undergraduate degree. This time next year, it will be my turn to put on a graduation gown and take photos all over SWUFE.
My junior year has been a complete mess: anxiety, overthinking, mental pressure, and struggling with peer pressure. I took 70 credits this year to repair the terrible grades I had in my first two years. I sent out hundreds of applications and received only a few offers. Rejection kept arriving.
When I was interning alone in Beijing in May, I asked myself the same question every day. Where am I going? Should I graduate and become another small part of a big tech company, carried along by whatever happens around me? Should I keep preparing to study abroad, accept an unknown offer, and walk into an unknown life? Or should I work on my connections and find a job where I can stop trying? I did not know what I wanted. I did not know which choice counted as reasonable.
I miss middle school and high school. Everything had a standard answer then. I did not have to think before knowing which direction was correct. Now I am standing at a crossroads, and I have no idea where any road leads.
Everything remains UNCERTAIN.
I am the kind of person who cannot win the race but cannot lie down either. Somewhere in my head, playing games for a while on the weekend still feels guilty. I often think of myself as a low-energy rat hiding indoors. I often feel that I do not have enough strength left to reach a better result.
For the past few years, I thought I was working hard. Much of the time, I was exhausting myself on a track set by the mainstream. I followed other people into applications for big tech internships and into fields I did not even like. I only realised this in the past few days: almost none of the roles I applied for were roles I wanted. I have no interest in mathematics or computer science, yet I kept applying for analytics and technical jobs that I neither enjoyed nor did well. I applied because they sounded fancy.
I rarely stopped long enough to ask whether this was a road I wanted. Maybe I felt lost because I had been living inside someone else’s standard answers.