The Mid-College Life Crisis vs. The Mid-Life Crisis

Take a break from studying, find yourself a quiet place away from your roommates, and scream until your lungs explode. Congratulations! You’ve just become a junior with no clue in the world about what to do after graduation. In other words, welcome to the mid-college life crisis, we’re glad to have you with us.

Why should adults in their fifties get all the fun? We, as students, have only known how to do one thing for upwards of fifteen years: be a student. This time of crisis is the moment we realize that we’re almost done being students and have to become (pause for dramatic effect) adults.

Think of everybody as cookie dough—highly aware cookie dough. When you reach the mid-college life crisis, you’re almost done being a cookie and when you hit the mid-life crisis, you’re cookie existence is almost over. Thing is, they’re not all that different.

I still remember when it hit me. In the oven that is college, I was finishing up my sophomore year and began to ponder the inevitability of graduation, adulthood, and a mortgage payment. For the record, I still don’t know what that last one is and I am now in my senior year. It is different than the well known “sophomore slump,” because this can hit you when you’re a junior and its reasons, overall, make you ponder grad school and a job.

Regardless, I began to freak out. I had yet to champion an internship of any kind, had the same job for a year, and my resume still had achievements from high school. I didn’t scream (although I should have), but I did manage to breakdown into a ball of tears and despair. It’s hard being in that nether-region of realizing where you’ve been and how close you are to being done. You’ve enjoyed the ride and ultimately can’t wait to be done. It’s in the act that we distract ourselves from the finish line. Sometimes I wish that courses were offered in college like: Job Hunting 204: How to Land Your First Job or Adult 101: The Mysteries of the 401K.

If you think about it, we spend the whole of our lives baking in different racks of this oven, from kindergarten to your last year of college, unaware until the very end that we’re nearly done. The once we’re done, we’re taken out and brought into adulthood, where we become accustomed to the working life and vacation days and a routine that felt just like school, minus the teachers and exams. Day by day, we get closer to that age where we begin to realize that we’re almost done with being adults and then we hit crisis mode. We will think about our past, what we’ve done, how we’ve arrived to this moment. We will dwell over cashing in our 401Ks, retirement packages, and where we want to spend the rest of our lives with our significant other. In a sense, we trade one crisis for another later in life. But in the end, we know that they’re only temporary.

Like any problem, there are multiple ways to approaching it. You can talk to your friends about it, because you’re all in the same boat heading to the same port; commiserating is one way of coping. Another way is to try and talk to your academic counselor, that’s why they’re there: to help you get your life together. Specifically, I just looked at the bigger picture and realized that I still had two years to figure everything out, to iron the details. This moment, right here, shouldn’t be an explosion of immediate tasks and chores to be checked off and achieved. Time is something you can control and if you think about it hard enough, you have all the time in the world. Perhaps, you aren’t done baking yet, but when you are, you’ll be one delicious cookie.