I had many questions about my future when I transferred to Asbury, but my expected graduation date was not one of them. I was coming off a rocky freshman year in which I had to make the difficult decision to leave my intended career path behind. While constant doubts raced through my head too quickly for me to grasp, I was happy to cling to a solid timeline. I prepared myself to launch into my sophomore, junior and senior years at Asbury, planning a clean 2026 exit with the Restored Class. This felt to me like my only option to the point where I avoided the idea of committing to a double major, even though I knew it was what I wanted. It took me two years to realize that I could seek an alternative.
As students at a four-year school, college is typically only presented to us as a four-year opportunity. I hear it in the panicked voices of well-meaning acquaintances who can’t wrap their heads around the idea that I do not yet have a solid post-graduation plan. I have heard myself express the same fears over the past three years as I desperately tried to fit everything I wanted to do into the conventional timeline.
There is far too much pressure on college students to stick to the plan of starting college at 18 and graduating by 22, and far too little discussion about the successes of people who did not follow that exact plan. I know people who began college years after graduating from high school, who took time to work and to explore what they wanted before investing in higher education. I know people who started college, dropped out and later came back when they were ready. I thought at first that I wouldn’t get to know anyone else who stayed past the four-year mark, but I was wrong, and I know now that I am far from alone.
My decision to stay another year stemmed from a number of reasons, the main one being that I wanted to pursue a double major. My interests in many different aspects of the humanities have always made it difficult to come to terms with sticking to one field of study in college. My college experiences have also slowly shown me how much I love to write, and I want to pursue more opportunities to develop my own voice before I leave. My required English class for this semester solidified my notion that I wanted to commit to an English major, a decision that I feel confident in. Still, it’s been difficult to let go of an expectation that once provided a sense of structure and stability for my college experience. Choosing to stay for an extra year means changes like not graduating with the people with whom I sit in chapel, the people with whom I have moved through these past few stages of college. However, it also means having more time with the people who will still be here. There is a series of tradeoffs that have to be made, and I’ve decided that I’m okay with them.
I could be preparing to graduate this spring, but to do so would be to ignore my gut feeling that I have more to learn and explore while I am here. It is not that I’m avoiding the responsible decision, but that I’m making those decisions on my own terms. I think it’s helpful to remember that deviating from the dominant timeline in the college narrative does not have to mean that someone has failed. It could just mean that they are rerouting themselves towards a timeline that better suits them.
If there is one thing that I am having to learn over and over again, it is that holding onto expectations that we have grown out of never serves us well. The growth that we experience in college and our ever-evolving understanding of our interests should not be stifled solely because they don’t fit into what we thought we would want at 18 years old. None of us can fully predict or control our futures. Although it has been difficult, allowing my college timeline to shift has taught me to appreciate that uncertainty.
Photo courtesy of Asbury University.
