Advice about life after college: 'Don't sell out'
By David Wonpu
Congratulations to the class of 2008. Most of you worked very hard to get to this point, and even if you didn't, you still paid enough money to justify carrying a laminated shrink-a-degree in your pocket for the rest of your life. You should be nothing but proud of your accomplishments.
I hope that you are prepared for life as a confused pseudo-adult.
Perhaps you are. Perhaps you aren't. Regardless, just in case your valedictorian decides it's more important to make his or her painfully sentimental mother cry by squawking out some tired cliché about commencement day being "a beginning, not an ending," an incredibly jaded -- but still hopeful -- member of the class of 2007 has a few choice nuggets of advice for those about to embark on the journey into the mythical real world.
First things first: No one is going to care about what you have to say. This is a reality that college not only shelters you from, but blatantly misleads you about.
In school, you are encouraged to have a steadfast confidence in your beliefs and a thirst for meaningful conversation.
In the real world, you're no longer the person with 300 Facebook friends and an actual slot in the important social hierarchy. You're a nobody.
Your sense of self-identity will also be profoundly affected. Once you're out of school, your identity can no longer be defined by external factors. Maturing requires a deeper level of introspection where you can admit who you actually are, not who you pretend to be.
You will also experience, possibly for the first time, the actual consequences of your actions. Every decision you have made in your life up to this point will start to either bear you fruit or unleash karmic havoc on your life. You will have no one to blame for your shortcomings but yourself, and that can be absolutely terrifying.
Most of all, the confusion of your early 20s can be largely attributed to your own sense of purpose. Some of you don't, and might not ever, have one. Others will have big dreams, but will not have enough past experience to turn those dreams into a career.
Even those of you who have the next 30 years of your life planned out will come to realize that, just because you work for something and want it badly doesn't mean it's yours. There are literally millions of people who want the same things you do.
You might even come to find that your dreams were never really your own.
As an adult, you will have many starts and stops, as well as times when you give up on your goals entirely. You will moderate the disappointment of living an existence revolved around merely earning a paycheck by frivolously spending most of it.
You'll lose friends and lovers, some of whom you might never be able to replace. But, through all of this turmoil, you're not actually supposed to give in and compromise yourself.
Instead of letting the world break you down, the key is to build a life wherein the best possible version of yourself can thrive and grow.
Life as an adult will be daunting, difficult and heartbreaking. The trick is to not sell out.
Don't let go of your optimism, but temper it with experience. Idealism is a powerful thing, but it is not truly effective until it is fortified by practicality. Romance without self-respect is just sex, and love can no longer be just an unexplainable feeling but must be a tangible series of actions.
It is your duty to make your life as good as it can be, because unlike what you are made to believe in college, change cannot be institutionalized.
The world as a whole is ugly, and it's not going to get better regardless of who you vote for and what policies those individuals promise to enact. The only real change is personal.
So there you have it. Life will probably suck, but you have the power to make it suck less. It's scary, but it's also gratifying. You finally get to do it all on your own instead of blaming other people for your failings.
Really, it's just called growing up.
David Wonpu graduated from Santa Clara with a B.A. in English in 2007.