Settled but not so settled.

We have all thought about it at least once if not at all. It’s a certain topic that you would wish to be free from in your mind but it just does not go away.

It is that question that people around you would have been asking you before you joined college and it is something that people wont stop questioning you about. 

What Next?

What Next are two words that make many people get the jitters, make you rethink a lot and for the better part just makes one nervous.

As a student one faces this question initially just as one would cross 10th Grade. Completing boards, feeling proud and glad that you do not have to touch those rote learning subjects like History or Geography anymore, is when you get questioned... “So, what do you want do pursue in your life?” or rather “What do you aim to become?” and that’s when your head begins to spin, “Hmmm which subject did I really enjoy studying all these years, Oh! Yes, Eco was good or wait no Physics” and then you end up picking one of the two and giving a vague answer of your interests to just move the topic along.

It then comes up in a much more pressing manner and a greater degree of seriousness when you start applying for your undergrad degree. What specifically do you want to apply for and which colleges are within your capability.

That small window of time before 12th Boards and those three months of free time after it is a big deciding factor on how life is going to turn out for you. You would at the time get to know whether you have got in to a college you would have listed as in your list of preferences or whether you have not.

Either way once you get in and finalise on one such college, you reach a sense of calmness for the near future. A feeling of relief where you can finally answer all those questions being asked to you sometime back on what you are going pursue and do in life.

Just like I had thought the same, 2 years of college flew by before I knew it and there it was again, What Next?

It sure does keep following you and gets annoying to think about, or shall I say presses you harder after a period of time. At this point of time when you are in the middle of college, achieving a high CGPA becomes a secondary worry. The primary worry becomes achieving a high CGPA for what exactly?

You start thinking, do you really want to spend all that money and go abroad or just do it in India, if in India then where?

That feeling that you have just settled in after being here for a year or so slowly becomes a bit uncomfortable. You have to start to plan for your journey ahead and you start to feel bad about leaving the life you have began to enjoy here, your friends, those college imperfections that you always complain about.

Truth be told that feeling will never go away, you just have to end up adapting to every new place you go because yes there will be a new place.

After you get through this phase for your next college for postgrad, it will continue to your job, where do you want to apply? What field are you exactly interested in? It will follow you when you go on to switch jobs after working for at a place for many years. That feeling of unsettlement.

It will never go away easily but how you deal with it matters, by not getting stuck up or very attached to certain places helps and having a unit of close people to converse with no matter where you are, its probably your best way of getting through it.

 By, Neel Kadambi