Not Quite Living the Dream

Do Students Plan to Follow Through With Future Plans

Julia Alley, Newspaper Managing Editor

Our upbringings were filled with mantras of: Follow your dreams, if you do what you love, and you’ll never work a day in your life, telling us to not become complacent and to take the leap into greatness. Looking forward to the future though, there doesn’t seem to be much chance of most people following any type of passion.

Being in high school with a sudden awareness that time is passing incredibly quickly is bone-chilling. There are just a few years for us to decide what we’re going to do for the rest of our lives, which is an unproportionally important decision to make when you don’t even have your whole frontal lobe. If you’re one of the few that somehow already figured it out, and is ready for the future, that’s great, let’s hope it lasts. If you haven’t though, then you’re like nearly everyone else.

Being rushed to choose our path in life when we have very little experience in deciding what we want is unreasonable. This idea of finding your dream and living it has been ingrained in us since we were old enough to understand it, but what was meant to be motivational advice has lead to a nightmare for students who don’t understand why they haven’t figured it out.

Only 44% of students have a plan set in place for what they want to do after graduation and this number is only growing says Allaboutcareers.com, a career research website. Yet there is still a lack of attention given to this issue. No one seems ready to offer assistance rather than encourage students to just pick something.

On the contrary, if you’re one of the lucky few who actually have deciphered what they want to do for the rest of their life, another problem arises. The issue of whether it will work out for them in the future. There’s a lot of careers that can be very difficult, and possibly impossible, to actually pursue. It can be excellent to have high hopes, but the actuality is that you probably won’t quite reach the level of accomplishment that you hope to. Realistically, there’s a very slim chance you’re going to become a billionaire, in fact, a .000002% chance according to Gawker.com. Statistically, you’re not the next Bill Gates. If you’re under 40 there’s a 1 out of 55 chance that you will even become a millionaire as stated by St. Louis Fed’s Center for Household Financial Stability, so I wouldn’t suggest planning your life around being wealthy.

To sum up, give up, and I mean that in the nicest way, your dreams are either nonexistent, unattainable or just the incorrect choice for you; so find something to make your life more enjoyable while doing no harm to others.