Graduation is looming. What now?
Lauren Dodds UA’26 and Jim Stellar
LD is approaching graduation in the spring, and we decided to write about it.
There is nothing that concentrates the mind of a college student more than coming up on graduation. It happened to JS when he was a junior and ran into a mentor who encouraged him to drop the bio-pre-med plan and consider going into neuroscience research. And he did. LD is, admittedly, less focused on a specific plan post-graduation, and more on a feeling. She has always had a knack for trusting her gut and knowing that time will reveal answers to looming questions. When applying to and touring colleges for admission, she knew she would feel connected to the school that would be the right choice – and that trust paid off! Four years later she has met some of the most amazing people, including writing partners, mentors, and bridesmaids in her future wedding. This university is a community that never fails to surprise.
“What now?” is the question haunting most college graduates. Given the current focus on internships (and JS who says “internship” is his middle name) how many can one apply to before reaching the moral cut-off? Is the part-time job that LD took as a temporary position to make money going to turn into a full-time forever job? The fear of growing old at her current food-service employer is certainly a real one for LD. But trying to answer the question of “what now?” does not intimidate her. Instead, she feels inspired. “What now?” only exists because the possibilities are endless – “what now!” should be the phrase – what adventure will she explore next? What hobby will she pick up to fill the time that used to be reserved for hours of homework and classtime? Where will she travel now that classes don’t demand her attendance? Who will her next lesson come from if not a college professor? These are the questions that demand answers. So, when her grandparents, aunts, uncles, and parents ask LD “what’s the plan post-grad?”, she’ll respond, “anything and everything.”
I (JS) tend to recall my own experience in which my premedical undergraduate biology and medical school career plans jumped the tracks and switched into pre-research in neuroscience and graduate school plans. My mother was not happy. After loving working at an internship in a university research laboratory on rat brains and pleasure (think cocaine), I got the question from my mother, “What am I going to do with a rat-brain doctor?” The rapidity of my switch caught everyone off guard, including me, but perhaps not my faculty mentor. I had one advantage over LD. That was in my junior/senior summer, I landed in a place in a university research laboratory where I was inspired like I never had been inspired before. Also, that was in the early 1970s and after all these years I can look to the past and say that it was a good moment for me. LD is looking to the future and that is always harder.
However, JS’s search for what to do was the same search that LD is undertaking. She is using her feelings and direct experiences on top of a classically good undergraduate education (her’s in English, mine in Biology). And that is how the limbic system rolls in the human brain. When it flashes on, the cognitive system that forms and mediates our plans tends to comply. Cognitive-emotional integration in the brain as college students figure out their career path is now a common theme in this blog series. What makes this one different is that here the limbic system seems to be guiding the journey and maybe the cognitive system is following. Another recent blog wrote about this idea of the “back of the head” doing the evaluation, not the “heart” and maybe this is the same.
Letting the limbic system lead is not a bad approach, and maybe much more common than we think in a world where concrete plans are valued too much, and such exploration takes a back seat. Now I (JS) did not have a blog about which to write about these factors back in my day, but LD is quite similar to how I was at her age (maybe smarter and certainly a better writer), so we as blog readers have an opportunity now and over the next few years to go with her on this journey of discovery, at least as long as she is willing to have us do it.
I (LD) am determined to see what the world has to offer before I step into the role of adulthood. Concrete plans can wait – the limbic system and I are going off the high of experience for motivation. I (LD) never plan to stop writing. Oftentimes it’s the only way I can sort through my thoughts. Maybe I’ll even write about the journey as a post-grad trying to find her place on a planet of eight billion people. So as long as I write, I will be writing for this blog too. Let’s see where the wind takes me, and you, on this all-to-familiar journey of self-discovery.
