Are you a junior in college slamming your head against the wall just because you didn’t get an A on your last writing assignment? Are you realizing that maybe it’s time to take your major seriously so that you can start applying for jobs? Are you cringing inside as you see your friends acquiring internships at high-end companies and posting it on their social media while you’re sitting in your bed watching Netflix? Have you thought about graduate school yet? What about your social life? How is that going?
If you’re feeling overwhelmed and confused, it might be because you are facing a mid-college crisis!
College students nowadays have been groomed to achieve and are constantly raising the bar to succeed, whether that’s in their field of study or personal success. This has also consequently caused an unnecessary amount of anxiety that could be derived from being scared about the future or regretting something from the past, therefore wanting to make certain self-adjustments. Or for some students, maybe they have come to the realization that it’s time to take some risks.
For junior year in particular, this is really when pressure culminates and it finally registers that there is not a lot of time left before you have to take the next steps on your own. In fact, students can even start to become competitive and intensify their mid-college crisis by comparing themselves to their peers.
According to Dr. Margaret McClure, an associate professor of psychology at Fairfield University, it just so happens that with this generation of college students, anxiety in this cohort is becoming the most common mental health concern and this comes from a variety of factors. She emphasizes that not only have students become more introspective because there is the feeling that there is a lot at stake, but there has also been tremendous pressure put on students who attend a private university like Fairfield and who come from a higher socioeconomic background.
With regards to a mid-life crisis, Dr. McClure notes, “If we think about some of the developmental psychology and Erik Erikson’s theory of development, something that is an important part of late life is the process of looking back over your life and thinking about if the choices you made were the right ones or if you have gotten to a place in your career in your personal life where you had envisioned yourself going. So I think the stereotype of a mid-life crisis comes from that normative process and some individuals maybe look back and think they made the wrong decisions.”
The concept of the mid-college crisis is basically the college version of a mid-life crisis, except that this kind of crisis involves a lot of different aspects of your life affecting you at the same time, whereas a mid-life crisis occurs because there is a lack of change and change wants to be forced.
“With a mid-life crisis, we see that people are essentially coming to a realization or awareness of a thought process,” Colby Putnam said, who is a staff member of a Christian Fellowship called Intervarsity and is an alumnus with a degree in marketing from Quinnipiac University.
With this in mind, let’s take two college juniors as examples to help you understand what a mid-college crisis can look like.
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Dale Klingensmith from Yarmouth, Maine is always at the Fairfield University library sitting at one of the long wooden tables with his phone and laptop plugged into the gold electrical lamp and his notebooks stacked on top of each other and perfectly aligned. His flashcards are rolled up in rubber bands and his binder is twice the size of a textbook. He is wearing black rimmed glasses glaring at his laptop intensely, and his long fingers are effortlessly typing away.
He is so serious about doing homework that he even brings his friend, who is a senior and lives at the beach houses, to come along with him to the library to make sure that they are both getting ahead with their schoolwork and are using their time effectively before going to any beach house parties. Without a doubt, the library has become Dale’s cocoon and it has been his cocoon since his sophomore year when he decided that it was time to change from being a communication major to being a politics major with a minor in history.
While Dale is catching up by taking multiple politics classes to gain more of the credits that he needs, he is also preparing for the LSAT’s taking place in June. The LSAT is a huge test that students take in order to be qualified for law school and continue their political careers.
“It’s almost like reapplying for college over again while you’re already in college,” Dale said.
For the most part, Dale is excited to escape the college bubble and take his next steps into the real world. In the back of his mind, Dale has always wanted to pursue law and everyone that he has worked with from the Dean of Students Office where he interned and from the restaurants that he has worked at have all been supportive of his decision. Dales describes them even as being “freakishly supportive.”
“I am a lot more secure as a politics major than I was as a communication major. I just realized that it’s not what I want to do with my life. But then to that point, what if I don’t want to do politics or law for the rest of my life? So that’s also on the cake,” Dale said.
At a glance, he seems like he is all put together and focused. But believe it or not, even Dale is stressed with the process of undergoing junior year.
“I am ready to go,” Dale said.
Similarly, Kathleen Barter, a nursing major from Huntington, Long Island, is feeling the pressure cooking during her junior year. She is afraid that if she doesn’t study enough or if she forgets a concept, she will perform a certain procedure incorrectly on a patient as an actual nurse one day. That is why every test that she takes matters and if she were to miss one step, then she could potentially make a vital mistake.
However, Kathleen has certainly earned her stripes because at her years at Fairfield U thus far, she has completed two clinicals, one for mental health at the Yale New Haven Hospital and the nursing home Lord Chamberlin Nursing and Rehabilitation Home in Stratford, Connecticut.
According to Kathleen, “I find clinicals to be useful because interacting with patients is very important for nursing. It’s very nerve racking at first to meet your first patient. So the more exposure I get, the better. It’s scary just to go up to someone and do a procedure on them. Even just talking to them can be nerve racking since you don’t know what type of mood they will be in and what they’re going to say to you.”
That is why when Kathleen has labs for her classes, she works on all of the skills that she will need to utilize as a real nurse and has been studying more in order to ensure that she will prevent herself from messing up during her lab practicals. In her case, the fear factor is almost a healthy kind of stress since her top priority as a nurse is to help people.
“With the skills I learn, I try really hard in the lab to get those down and get them correct because if I gave someone the wrong injection, that’s not good,” Kathleen said.
Kathleen is striving to become a nurse practitioner and her plan out of college is to work for a year in order to gain more experience interacting with patients and then get her masters and become a registered nurse. As nursing school is closely coming to an end, Kathleen is determined to retain and soak in as much information as she can in order to become the nurse that she has always wanted to be.
On top of her career anxiety, Kathleen is also feeling relational anxiety with the particular relationship with her boyfriend. While they have been dating for almost a year, she is worried about the relationship status as college keeps chugging along since she is unsure about how the relationship will work in the future.
“Since I am a junior and will be ending sooner than he will, I am not sure how the rest of college will affect the relationship,” Kathleen said.
For Dale and Kathleen, there is a certain level of doubt and this is what really makes the mid-college crisis alive and circulating its way to the bright minds of students across all college campuses. “The amount of uncertainty that you have always makes you wonder ‘Is this really what I want to do?’ I feel like I have that,” Dale said.
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Colby Putnam’s dream is to be a pastor and because he is dedicated to his ministry work, he knows quite a bit already about mid-life crises that helps us figure out why it is that college students feel like they have a mid-college crisis. Even though Colby never had a mid-college crisis himself when he was an undergraduate and doesn’t anticipate on having a mid-life crisis, he knows the questions that you would ask yourself during a mid-life crisis still apply to the hypothetical situation of a mid-college crisis.
“The questions that come up are what am I really doing with my life, what I am doing with my time and am I wasting it or am I investing it properly, and the main question that it comes down to is what is my purpose and is there meaning in that. There is a little bit of panic if you don’t have the answer to these questions, which is why it arises and so much anxiety happens,” Colby stated.
Colby suggests that the earlier you ask these types of questions, the better chance you have at living with more fulfillment and conclude that what you might be doing is meaningful. For Colby, the only way that you can do that is by finding your identity in Christ. He also believes that having a mid-college crisis is actually a productive stage and not necessarily one that is to someone’s disadvantage.
He explained, “My advice is almost counter intuitive because I wouldn’t say here is a way to avoid your mid-life crisis, I would say embrace it because it means that you are asking the right questions at the right time. Take the time to answer those question because your anxiety is coming from your purpose and your purpose comes from who you are. The Ignatian questions that we have here at Fairfield are who am I, whose am I, and what am I called to be.”
Ultimately, it’s important that you don’t make your job the only thing that defines you and makes you happy because there are so many more experiences to be had. Colby highlights the point that your life has intrinsic value given to you by God and therefore, what you do you do for Him and this is what makes it worth wild. Essentially, don’t be afraid of having a mid-college crisis, embrace it instead.
Life is like a Ferris wheel because you are always moving and looking at your environment from different perspectives as you go. Occasionally, the Ferris wheel pauses and breaks down for a moment, almost like in college when you stop what you’re doing to self-reflect. So many changes happen in college and it’s okay to stop and think about how you’re going to prepare for your next steps. But the Ferris wheel will start up again and continue to spin and sometimes it’s best just to go on the ride.
