The College Journey

   A time or period of travel, a passage or progress from one stage to the next one, a trip or a voyage, a journey portrays different concepts for all those walks of life without ambiguity.  Therefore, journey, can take the role of a metaphor.  It accomplishes this utilizing its internal and fundamental characteristics, as they can be representative of a process, achieving goals, physical travels, and the aforementioned examples of the walks of life. An example of a journey is college life, those four years or so of a bachelor’s degree in which one grows physically and mentally, a passage through stages where the student embarks in an internal journey to define his identity.

  During a student’s college years one changes, evolves, grows, learns… The student usually finds his true self, understands who and how he or she is, decides and prepares himself for the next step of his life. It’s precisely through this evolution that the student undergoes an intentional or sometimes unintentional discovery of his identity.  One of these identifiers is cultural identity; the student is predisposed to this factor continuously in college. The exposition to professors, friends, classmates who all have different mind sets and beliefs, shapes and has an innate effect in the student’s cultural identity.

   Through my college years I have definitely changed and shape my perspective of life, my future, my goals, and have developed a dissertation strategy to ultimately know what really is important and worth it. When I began my first year of college my mindset was to simply get straight A’s, get to medicine graduate school, have a swift passage during my college years with a lot of studying. I was in for a huge surprise to find out what I thought college to be, was not, I was shocked to be confronted with cheating, injustices, disrespect, students were not individual people just a quantifiable number.

    I was confronted with the realities of life, the real world, as we know it. The A was for the teacher, the B for the book and the C for the students. It was hard to adapt at first, then one became acquainted with the fact this was a survival of the fittest, and everyone else who shares the same goals is inevitably your competition whether you want it or not. As the years went by that stress and truth as I thought I knew it changed, the only thing that really mattered was your knowledge, your story, and my college years. And all was a matter of perspective, get surrounded by the right people, it was sometimes better to be alone, study and do your best, and you would eventually succeed in all your goals, proceed otherwise and the frustration would cloud your judgment and your path would be interrupted.

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  The notion of identity in human society is based on two fundamental factors- the perception of sameness/difference and the instinctiveness of man to be a social being (Roberts).  Although you might be treated differently which implies the perception of difference and otherness, stick to what you know and your beliefs. You are what you know, and only true knowledge will set you free. One always learns something new and the only thing that is constant is change and so every time we learn so will our perspective, our journey will take a new shift and our identity will have a new piece integrated to the never ending puzzle.