Do you ever get the feeling like you're always trying to catch up to everyone else?
I do.
and relatively often.
I know that it is somewhat ridiculous to sit here and compare myself, my success in any given area of life, with others, but to a degree (no pun intended) I think that is somewhat ingrained in you when you graduate from a school like UNC. There, it seems like everyone has an ambition 3x the capacity of what should be expected of a normal human being, and everyone wants to hit it big when they finish...having that 4.0 GPA on your double major while magically having several years of work, humanitarian experiences, and research, a north face jacket, an intramural sports championship winner t-shirt, and several open-armed admissions letters from the top grad schools in the country (because everyone knows that's where the real success starts...sometime between your master's and your 3rd Ph.D.).
Somehow, my ambitions didn't quite pan out. I do have a great job that I enjoy but that was not necessarily due (or related really) to my double major, and I certainly didn't get my 4.0. I got plenty of good work experience but that was not the prestigious internship or the amazing research position, instead its rewards were simple things...like learning to deal with people, and paying for bills. Oddly enough, one of these odd jobs had more weight on me getting a job than my degree's subjects. I never got that cool black north face jacket, I was too busy or out of shape to attempt the intramural open swim meet, and I got 10 slaps in the face from the nation's top ranked (and not so top ranked) dental schools.
Some of these outcomes could be attributed to various decisions made, priorities chosen, and other things that I had control over. Others just seemed to happen out of some type of mysterious cosmic decree. The crazy part is that I feel like I worked two or three times harder just in striving for my planned goals. My closest friends were classmates at the top of each class...I studied with them, volunteered with them, and during the times when most people were partying, resting, or "livin' it up", I worked even harder. I always have. I had real jobs to sustain myself, poured myself into understanding my course subjects, and had more hands-on knowledge and experience in the career I was striving for than most applicants...but when I look at the results, there's times when I wonder if I would have gotten the same outcome being a couch potato with only a half-ounce of ambition...and a half-ounce, by the way, is not very much.
I struggle to understand how none of my plans really came to fruition despite my maximal efforts, and what came to be was completely unintentional. Somehow when it was all over with and the dust settled, my brilliant classmates moved on to do some truly outstanding things, and I'm back to the drawing board trying to figure out how to catch up.
