Hello 2017

Why hello there 🙂🙂

I hope everyone had a happy and safe New Year’s 🙂🙂

The best descriptor of how I feel about the coming year is ‘nervous.’ In a perfect world, this should be the time when I begin applying to grad schools, bulking up my résumé, and figuring out what on Earth I am going to do when I am no longer in school. But alas, this is not the case. I am going to be staying an extra term to complete a minor in Linguistics, and I am considering also doing an honours degree in Psychology. 

My family is concerned that this would be a waste of time but honestly, I don’t know if I’m ready to leave university yet. University may be a fast-paced, stressful, and pressure-filled environment, but it’s an environment I know and love. I have been attending school in some form for the past 17 years of my life, and I don’t know what I would do if I had to go elsewhere. I am also a complete school nerd and always feel like there is more to learn. Furthermore, universities offering graduate programs in what I would like to study are all abroad, either across Canada or in other countries entirely. One might think I would see that as an opportunity for adventure, but one would be mistaken: I am more concerned about being away from my cat for that long. 

This is one of those contemplative times in my life where I don’t feel 21 years old, but instead 7 years old where my biggest concern should be who I am going to sit with at lunch or where I want to have my birthday party. Sometimes school can be really overwhelming but it is a routine lifestyle that I have learned to thrive in. I am one of those people who has always known what they wanted, and so I now struggle to accept and be content with not knowing. 

And then there’s deciding on what kind of career I want to pursue. I remember back in elementary school, teachers told us we could be anything we wanted, but they said nothing about having to pick just one option. As I research graduate schools and PhD programs (yikes!!!), I keep thinking that there are so many things I want to be and do, and now I have to pick just one to specialize in. Speech Language Pathologist. Audiologist. Lawyer. Professor. Researcher. There are so many choices and I just don’t know which one. Law was my plan when I started university but now I just don’t know. I am so grateful for all of the opportunities I have been afforded throughout my life that enable me to have such a wide selection, but this doesn’t make the decision any easier. 

Last year, in my Hello 2016 post, I talked about my resolutions for the coming year, and I think I did a pretty good job of achieving them (though really, a study date in the library is never as productive as I think it will be), so this year I wanted to set some more resolutions, but some of these are definitely more difficult: 

♥Figure Out When I Am Going to Graduate and What the Heck I Want to Study in Graduate School (If Anything)

This one is going to be a year-long affair but I have already started mapping it out and I should be good to go by December 2017 . . . maybe. I will have completed all of the required courses for application to all of the graduate programs I am interested in, which is a huge comfort so this coming year is going to be spent volunteering and exploring what careers in my areas of interest would be like. As old of a soul as I know myself to be, I do know that, at 21, I am still very young and have plenty of time to change my mind, and I must continue to work on appreciating that. 

♥ Learn to Meditate

I have read and heard of the benefits of meditation and I plan on going to weekly meditation sessions to learn how to achieve this state of inner tranquility. I am the type of person who always has to be doing something “productive” with a foreseeable end result or else I feel guilty, so this will be a lesson for me on how to just be with no time limit, expectation, or goal. 

♥Blog More

This one I have carried over from 2016 because I never set up a proper posting schedule and ended up publishing whenever I had the time. This year, I am scrapping the idea of a formal schedule and instead have started a notebook of post ideas and drafts I can work through when inspiration strikes. Thus, there may be some months with few posts and others with a plethora, and I am learning that to be ok with that. 

Have you made any resolutions for 2017??? Let me know in the comments 🙂🙂