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photo: JENNY McCARTNEY
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Great Expectations
By JENNY MCCARTNEY Last fall, the time had come to choose my major. I had visions of someone introducing me at a fancy event: “Jenny McCartney went to Pomona College and graduated with honors with a major in Awesome and a minor in Changing the World.”
Of course, everyone in my life had an opinion. My mother urged me to major in something general like English and take lots of different classes. My grandmother suggested I study, as she had in the 1950s, French and art history (despite my years of Spanish). My favorite blogger advised gender and women’s studies; film-club friends said media studies; and my faculty adviser recommended theatre. My older sister even wrote a column in this newspaper, using me as an example and advising past readers of On Campus not to obsess about the decision. A FRESH START College is no different from high school in the amount of expectations on you. Everyone has thoughts about what you should do and how you should do it. I’d lived through high school under my sister’s shadow, my parent’s advice, and the expectations from my peers. The good news is that college is a fresh start. While there are still expectations, boxes and pressures, you are more on your own than ever before. Your parents may want you to be pre-med or to major in something they enjoyed, but this is your college experience, not theirs. The most important thing I’ve learned through my first half of college is that you have to develop your own expectations. You have to decide if academics or sports or clubs or political activism is important to you. In the morning, no one is going to make you go to class or finish the reading. Your expectations are what will drive you to wake up or push through a dense article. And these expectations have to be realistic and achievable. In one of my favorite books on our generation, “Perfect Girls, Starving Daughters,” Courtney E. Martin describes the pressure girls (and also boys) put on themselves to be perfect. But, as Ms. Martin explains, this quest for constant perfection only results in an inner starving daughter full of self-doubt, loneliness and fear. I constantly see the quest for perfection and the inner turmoil in my friends: Ben pulled too many all-nighters last semester for his math class, Rosa feels like she can never spend enough time on the Workers for Justice campaign, and I wish I could do everything while still maintaining a life. But the truth is we can never have it all, and we can scarcely please everyone. We can only listen to the many voices around us: our parents, families, friends, teachers, television shows, blogs and inner pressure. Sometimes, you have to be willing to give yourself a break. MAGIC BALANCE I expect myself to work hard in academics and get a lot out of my education, but I don’t expect myself to always make perfect A’s. I hope that I will contribute meaningfully to my campus community, but if I join every organization, I will stretch myself too thin. Understanding priorities and time management is critical in college and beyond. In a study of sophomores in college, researcher Constance Buchanan discovered that successful time allocation was the deciding factor in a happy college experience. With so much unscheduled time, college students have to find that magic balance. In order to find my balance, I made a list of the classes I wanted to take, regardless of major requirements or the opinions around me. In the end, I decided to major in media studies and politics. I listened to the voices around me, but ultimately chose my major based on the experience I wanted. Living up to expectations can be a process full of confusion and struggle. But one of the greatest rewards of college is carving out new expectations for oneself, whether for grades, internships, relationships, or even columns. In this column, I will do my best to share my journey with you and build upon the wise words my older sister has written for the past two years—yet another opportunity for me to set my own expectations amid others’ shadows. | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
