The Limit Does Not Exist

With the academic year starting shortly for colleges nationwide, William & Mary among them, we’re constantly reminded of new beginnings and fresh starts. Back to school commercials play on every media channel, and we’re reminded of all that is new that awaits us: new clothes, new Integrated Science Center, new year, new you. For most of our years—kindergarten through the cessation of our schooling, whether that ends with undergraduate, graduate, or Ph.D./professional schooling, a new school year and the start of fall signify coming change.

But when you’re outside of school, it can be hard to anticipate change with the same symmetry and regularity that the structure of academia brings. Much of working life is unpredictability—while finals are scheduled and anticipated, any given day at work could be a “finals day” and you might never know when you arrive at the office in the morning.

I’ve found myself surprised, lately, at the level of unexpected change in my life. For the entirety of my formative years, I saw myself on one track—the humanities. From grade school through college, I pegged myself as a humanities student. I was terrible at math, everything from long division through calculus, but I excelled at English and History from an early age; thus, for me, I decided upon an impending major in English as a high school student.  The obvious progression of that English major would be a career in publishing, teaching, writing, something—anything that would play on the strengths and minimize the quantitative weaknesses I had decided were inherent from birth.

But life, unlike school, has a way of smacking you across the face at unscheduled times. No one was more surprised than myself when I left my job in college admission this spring for a job in IT. Where I had once shied away from math, science, and technology in favor of the humanities, I now find myself an IT consultant in a Quality Assurance role: testing software, running reports, and calculating errors full time. Unlike changing your major, changing your career can be sudden—there is minimal paperwork, no consultation with an advisor, no approval process. There is no permission from your parents required, either—one day a phone call comes, and you’re faced with the decision: to stay, or to leave.

I have yet to adjust completely to the paradoxical volatility and maddening boredom of adulthood. Long periods of mind-numbing responsibility—eight-to-six jobs, bills, cooking, car maintenance—are punctuated by sudden and exhilarating change. The world is so much bigger than the confines of campus, and freedom is endless—the freedom to take a new job anytime, travel to any state or country, adopt a dog, stay out all night in DC, buy a car.

After so many years punctuated by academic calendars and defined by limited responsibility, I miss the relationships and regularity from my W&M years like a security blanket. I miss sharing the same space and time as a group of people I called my best friends, some of whom I haven’t seen since graduation. I miss knowing that my classes will be at the same time every day for 3 months, that I have mixers and date parties on the calendar, that my life will follow the same neat and regular pattern that it has for every semester before and every semester after.

Life after college is messy. But it’s exhilarating—it’s about discovering that my horizons are broader than I thought they were, that I am the only person in charge of myself now, that the only limitations possible are financial (…and they make loans for that, right?). It’s knowing that I don’t have to follow neatly in the path pre-designated by my major. It’s knowing that the formula is gone—but in the ensuing chaos, a limit does not exist.

Newest colleagues in Northern Virginia.