If there’s anything I’ve learned over the past four years, although my transcript may indicate differently, it’s that we’ve been living in an oasis within a messy world. Not that Northwestern has been easy – the mental, social and academic obstacles we’ve been through are not to be brushed off– but that it has been more ordered and principled than reality. Success is much easier to define here. If you do the readings, go to class and study, then you pass your courses. You do this extracurricular for a certain career path, and that for another. You immerse yourself in a student group, and you make friends and rise to the top. Your efforts, more often than not, pay off, and when they don’t, or you screw up and do something like sleep through a midterm freshman year, there are concrete things you can do to get back on the “path to success.” Tutoring. Student groups. Social events. Sports games. Office hours. Internships. It’s almost an equation. It began with our socioeconomic status, college essays and SAT scores and will end with a diploma, and hopefully a fleshed-out resume and a recommendation letter for a dream job. But then what?

The uncertainty is inevitable, of course, and nothing new. It hit me hardest on a recent job assignment. I’ve worked for my employer for a while, and still find out hard to predict just what my roles and duties are going to be. One second I’m placing dinner orders, and the next I’m filming a police officer while he interviews a possible trafficking victim. I’m more likely to get yelled at than praised, and can’t tell if I’m succeeding or failing most of the time. I will never get another A; instead, it will be silences between the F’s. College has imbued us with equations, principles, philosophies and hypotheses, gleaned from pristine lecture halls, dog-eared textbooks and glistening computer labs, but their application is a different matter entirely. Reality doesn’t fit the confines of a lesson plan, and although some professors have tried valiantly to make up for that, the dirty work of discernment and decision still lies ahead for most of us. And yet, somehow, amidst the fear and anxiety, it’s exhilarating. There’s something more exciting about the unknown, about not knowing what your next move will be or if this risk will pay off. We’re as prepared as we’re going to be, and really, as anyone can be. With all of the readings done, authors memorized and programs learned, we get to start interpreting. Now we get to define our own success.