Why College Is About More Than Just Graduating

College is such a great accomplishment to have in your tool belt for many reasons—whether you’re applying for a job, graduate school, or just learning life skills in general, so it’s no wonder that we see graduation as the biggest milestone. For me, the day I received my diploma was one of the best feelings in the world.

And that makes sense. College is not easy, so when you push through, having a degree to show for it is worth a thousand words, if not more. This is especially true for seniors, as they anxiously await to get their diplomas and figure out their next steps after college.

But your senior year is about more than graduating. College, as a whole, is about more than graduating. Graduation is an important milestone, yes, and I would encourage anyone to celebrate it in whatever way they can and would like to, but graduation is not the point of college.

The point of college is exploration.
This does involve growing your professional skill sets for work, not to mention earning a degree opens many doors for you, but exploration in college is so much more than that. College is one of the few times in your life that you get to truly explore yourself.

College is a time you get to learn about your interests. That one math class you’re struggling in? Maybe once you overcome that hurdle, you’ll learn to love math in a way that surprises you. Or maybe that one English class you have that you thought you would love because you’re good at it actually turns out to be really boring, and you want to study a subject that challenges you more. Maybe you get halfway into your communication degree and then realize that you want to double major in anthropology instead.

You learn these things and more. And you never would have considered them had you not taken the classes required in your major or ones that served to fill in your credits for your major.

College is also a time when you learn about people from all walks of life.
You may meet young folks who are just starting out their lives, living in your residence halls, your off-campus complex, or at home with family, who aren’t quite sure what to do post-graduation. You also may meet older people, some married, some with kids, and all sorts of people.

Maybe you may meet that one person who knew she wanted to be a chemist since middle school and has already started tracking her path for medical school. Or you may meet folks in between ages and with various backgrounds—international students studying abroad, first-generation college students, and students from all walks of life.

Overall, there’s so much to learn outside of graduation.
The possibilities of what you can learn at college are beyond endless. At the end of the day, you probably won’t care what sort of grades you got, or how well you did in your classes, or even how long it took you to graduate. What I hope you’ll care about is that you made the most of your time in college. After all, isn’t that what life’s about—truly living every moment you have?