W.A.I.A.W.A.I.D.H. - Madeleine Perko

Who am I and Where am I going are questions I constantly think about, perhaps to a fault. I become particularly consumed by these questions during times of transition, such as this one: becoming an on campus Northeastern Student.

This kind of thinking comes naturally to me. I seem to always be thinking about how what I am learning informs my life goals. However, a lot of the time I wonder if this thinking is even productive. Some of the best things in my life have been a result of chance events that I could never have planned for, and many times, would never have even asked for. Still, sometimes I wonder if thinking hard enough about my future will enable me to definitively pin point exactly what I want to do, how to should go after it, how I will feel during the joinery and once I “attain” my end goal career/life,  and where this path will mean I end up. 

Unfortunately, there doesn’t seem to be a very clear path, and I often feel like what I want and the path I have to take to get there do not resemble each other. For example, I think I really would enjoy medicine, but the premed track is not necessarily reflective of what practicing medicine will be like. I can’t say that I overwhelmingly enjoy science courses, but LOVE the way they intersect with the human condition and the conversations they allow me to have outside of the classroom. Because of my passion for the crossroads, I feel somewhat torn between two paths, as there is no clear predetermined path for both. Ordinarily, I am not frightened by the lack of a path, but with the overwhelming opportunities that come from being on campus, I feel constantly that I am missing opportunities to find myself, better myself and make myself a competitive incoming member in society. Again, this is not to say that I am afraid of going on a different path, just that it is overwhelming and I feel that I will loose my way with everything swirling around me.

Also, because I feel that the path I am on will not be indicative of my life and career after college, I worry that I will loose myself along the way if I spend too much time being unhappy now for something I will enjoy later, or that prioritizing being happy now will mean I end up feeling trapped in something I do not enjoy later. Ultimately, this makes me desire a very broad education that sets the foundation for anything I might be able to do. Which is not the objective of this or even liberal arts universities, and its a distracting desire that makes me resent the gift that is my current situation at Northeastern. I feel like I haven’t been exposed many of the diverse options, yet I am committing to a very demanding and expensive path, without such context or information about where this path will drop me off. Ultimately, I feel like I am making a huge gamble and society is forcing my hand.

Something that has made this Boston transition in some ways harder, is the experiences I had in Greece. I feel that the time I spent there gave me a new perspective on what life could look like, yet as much as I try to hold onto the fundamentals that I adopted there, I feel like there is no way to compromise Greek me and American me in the US. However, I found it much easier to make that compromise while in Greece. So, I find myself questioning what am I doing HERE if I was happier there. Why was I happier there, was it simply that I found my place and I still have yet to do that here, or is it more profound than that. In the event of the latte, that opens another can of worms and means that there is a whole other set of paths in a country across the globe that I could consider.