Over the past few months I’ve been looking back at my time in my academic career and asked myself a couple of questions. Why am I not motivated? Why don’t I enjoy learning these complicated concepts the same way my peers do? Why do classes just feel tedious and boring?

I feel like my initial reaction to these thoughts were first the fact that the education system people rely on is extremely outdated and is not beneficial to people in the modern era. But this idea quickly drifted from my mind. I personally don’t think this was the issue since I’ve been thriving off this system throughout my primary and secondary education. In fact the use of standardized testing and quarterly exams made it possible for me to cram before many of my classes without knowing a thing a week before.

My second thought was that I just have zero value for grades and performance. Throughout high school, I largely felt pushed by my parents to perform in classes otherwise I feel like I’ve failed them in some way for all the things they’ve done for me. But I’ve always thought this push and their want for me to do well in classes was largely towards the ultimate goal of seeing me go to a good college, which I’ve seen accomplished, being accepted into the Univeristy of Chicago. And a friend pointed out that if I really didn’t care about the grades and performance I wouldn’t keep thinking about classes. Upon understanding this, I then began to question why exactly I was in college. I honestly didn’t think past the prestige and appreciation I would get from my peers and family so I didn’t have any real tradjectory of what I wanted to do.

So one thing I really wish I considered more seriously before going to college was taking a gap year. This way I would have had a chance to clear my head from all the things that tied me down in high school from regrets to loose ends and understand what I really wanted from college outside of the ectasy I had from making my dream school.

As soon as I entered college my goal was very simple, find a profession that would make me rich. While this is a really shallow goal, I thought the reasoning behind it made sense. I had very little interest in the professional world and the easiest way to guage “my best option” is by determining the value of each job by salary. With this in mind, my first goal was to break into the finance world.