By Yael Tangir, Business Editor
Dear Freshman Me,
There is a version of college that looks something like this: you arrive with a plan, you execute the plan, and somewhere around junior year, it all starts to make sense. You know what you want, you know how to get it, and the uncertainty that everyone warned you about turns out to be manageable. I believed in that version completely. And for a while, the belief itself felt like enough.
This lie informed the way I approached everything, waiting to feel ready before I applied for anything, waiting to understand a room before I walked into it, waiting for some internal signal before making any change. I thought clarity was something you arrived at before you started moving. Turns out, it’s something you earn by moving, and only by moving, without shortcuts.
College, especially business schools, makes a very convincing impression of a system that rewards people who have it figured out. The students who talk the most confidently in class, the ones with the internship lined up before sophomore year, the ones who seem to already speak the language, can all make you feel like everyone got a manual you didn’t. But spend three years actually watching people, and the picture gets more complicated. The ones who looked certain early are not always the ones who end up doing the most interesting things. Certainty and true competence are not the same, and college is one of the few places where you can confuse them for long enough to actually convince yourself that they are. Often, that early confidence comes from the opposite of ambition, from staying close to what’s already familiar, from choosing the path that requires the least reinvention. The student with the “perfect” internship locked in before sophomore year isn’t necessarily ahead; sometimes they just optimized for comfort early, which looks like competence until the real world asks something of them that their comfort zone never did.
What I learned, slowly and mostly through doing things before I felt ready, is that the people who develop real judgment are the ones who accumulate experience faster than everyone else, not because they’re smarter, but because they don’t wait for permission to start something. They apply for the role they’re underqualified for. They ask the question in the room where they’re the youngest person. They take the internship that doesn’t make obvious sense on paper and figure out what to do with it once they’re there.
There is a specific kind of moment that I think every serious person in college experiences at least once: you ask someone, a boss, a mentor, someone you respect, for direction, and what you get back is “figure it out.”
The first time it happens, it feels like a door closing. Eventually, you understand it as the opposite. What it actually means is that you are in the right room, being asked to operate at the level the room requires. Nobody hands you the answer in a real professional environment; they give you the problem, and, if you’re lucky enough, resources, and they expect you to work backwards from there. Learning to do that, to think through something with incomplete information and still make a decent call, is the most transferable skill you can walk away from college with. More than any specific ability, and more than a degree itself.
The thing about waiting for clarity is that it feels responsible. It feels like the mature approach is to get organized, understand the landscape, then act. But in practice, this mostly just means you act later than you should, with roughly the same amount of information you would have had if you’d started earlier. The landscape doesn’t become easier to navigate the longer you stare at it. It becomes easier to navigate when you’re in it.
So if I could go back and change one thing, it wouldn’t be a specific decision. It would be the pace. I would have moved sooner, applied earlier, asked more questions before I felt like I’d earned the right to ask them. Not recklessly, but hungrily. With the understanding that the people who end up knowing what they want are almost always the people who went looking for it before they were sure they’d find it. You are going to figure it out. Not before you start, but because you start. It is never too late to ask questions and to change career paths, but always remember that action is the cure for anxiety. That’s what moving before you’re ready actually gets you not just experience, but the only kind of clarity that was ever real.
— Your Senior Self
Photo Credit: Courtesy of Yael Tangir