Throughout my many years of schooling, one phrase has been beaten into my skull more times than I can count.

“This will prepare you for college.”

In college, they change this phrase to,

“This will prepare you for the real world.”

As many of us who went through high school and college know, these sentences are completely false.

High school made college out to be this horrid place where you would never be allowed to use a dictionary, and all calculators were burned upon entry into the classroom.

When we got there, however, it became clear that college might actually be easier than high school.

Sure, there are harder classes and many of our nights are still spent up to our elbows in coffee, homework, and tears, but all in all, college proved to be pretty relaxed.

High school was so high strung about us making the grade, and polishing us into clean little adult robots with brains that could spit out answers in a flash, but they forgot many crucial lessons that would actually prepare us for the real world.

Taxes. What do I do with them? How do I do them? Does it still involve Great Britain and the dumping of tea? Because that is the last I heard on the subject. How can I be expected to lead a life in the real world when I do not even know how to pay the government loan sharks?

Balancing a checkbook. Maybe this is a thing in the past. I know that checks are important for certain areas of life, but I could not tell you the first thing about balancing a checkbook. Is it like managing your accounts on a piece of paper instead of online?

The world blames me for being a millennial who does not understand the concept of a check, but it is the older generation that neglected to give me this knowledge in the first place.

Mortgages. For houses, and cars and apartments. Or maybe it is only for houses? How do I take one out? Do I need a good credit score? How do I manage a mortgage without the knowledge of a checkbook and a basic understanding of taxes?

This list could go on forever, but instead, I rather suggest something to the educational system.

The first thing is that, while you do need to prepare us for our further education, you do not need to focus so much on a letter grade.

I started going to school to learn, but that is not what it is about anymore. School is about fighting for a good grade on a test or a paper, and then instantly wiping our brains so we can load in more information.

The quality of education has seriously plummeted, along with the students will to learn.

And as for colleges, stop saying you are preparing us for the real world. We are already in the real world, and if you were trying to make it more confusing, then you did your job.

The second thing I propose, is that the educational system finds a way to make a mandatory class on day-to-day necessities, the taxes, the mortgages the checkbooks and so much more.

I still want to learn, but what I need to learn severely outweighs the extent of my “real-world” knowledge.

All of this being said there is one big lesson that school has taught me. It taught me that I have no idea what I want to do with my life in the real world.

I came into this world probably wanting to be an astronaut because I just always pictured myself taking a trip to the moon, like it was as simple as taking a bus to school.

When I realized I was afraid of heights and that I would probably have to understand science to go into space, I set my sights on teaching.

Above all things, I have always wanted to change the lives of those around me. Because my fifth-grade teacher changed my life significantly, I decided that I should do the same for other children. I wanted to be the reason that someone decided to stay in school.

My teacher also started to show me that I could be a pretty decent writer if I put my mind to it. I learned through high school that maybe I would not be good at teaching English.

I can understand grammar enough that I can write something intelligible on a page, but not enough to teach it.

So in college my sights changed yet again to something better: creative writing. Nothing says, “I do not have to understand basic rules” like creative writing.

And, for now, maybe that is what I want to do. But what school does not teach you is that you can be so much more than one thing.

You can be an A and a B student. You can be a writer and an actor. You do not have to fit into one mold.

They want to prepare us to be the best we can be in one subject, and for the most part it works. But I am so much more than one degree for one of the many things I like to do. And so is everyone else.

The most important thing that I learned during my time in school is that I can be whoever I want to be, but the best lesson I taught myself is that I do not only have to be one thing. I can be everything I want, I just have to go out and get it. I suggest you do the same.

The world is full of opportunity. I went to school and I promise you I do not regret any second of it.

High school and college got me to the point in my life where I realized that I wanted to be more than myself, and they have also given me the outlets where I can do exactly that.

They have given me the resources and the connections I needed to go out and do incredible things in my life, and the lives of others.

Education is simply important, and while I said that there are things that school did not teach me, they taught me that I would always want to know more.

Maybe they did not have a helpful real-world class, but they taught me that I am never done learning and that one place simply cannot do all the teaching.

Going to high school and college helped me discover that if I wanted to better myself and learn all that I could, I would have to go out on my own and find the answers.

It might sound scary, but that is the harsh truth of the real world. We know how scary it can be, but it is what we choose to do with our knowledge of it that can make it better or worse.

I am on a mission to make it better, and I hope I will meet some of you along the way who want to join me.

Keep learning, keep searching and most importantly keep being yourself. That is the one thing nobody else can teach you, but it is the most important thing you will ever learn.