I’m gonna be

At my elementary school, we all performed in a big musical show twice a year. Every grade would choose a song or two that fit the show’s theme, and we would get to skip class for a few weeks to prepare for our big performance. In fifth grade, my class sang a song titled “I’m Gonna Be” in the spring show. The song was a musical pep talk set to a trendy late-’90s riff that basically said that we had the potential to have any career we wanted. We were “gonna be” anything we could imagine being. I can still remember all 34 jobs listed in the rap section of the song — it was so indelibly etched in my mind from weeks of practicing — but recently I’ve been thinking of the song in a new light.

As I approach my senior year, I am beginning to realize that in the real world, I will not be an athlete, salesperson, programmer, dentist, beekeeper or many of the other jobs in the song. Until recently, recollections of this song were just side streets off Memory Lane, usually bringing my friends and me back to all the elementary school memories that we talk about over and over again. However, as I suddenly realize that I can’t start my sentences about my future career path with “When I grow up” anymore, the words of the song become a lot more challenging. Hurtling through spring semester, thinking seriously about post-college ventures, it is now clear to me that the end of college is close at hand, and that the mysterious “real world” that people purport to go to after Princeton does, in fact, exist.

A few weeks ago, a friend and I were talking about how strange it is to be so close to finishing our four years here. Though we still have one action-packed year of Princeton left, we are fast approaching the beginning of the “lasts” (last room draw, last time looking for a between-year summer job, etc.). My friend and I agreed that one of the strangest things of all is that one day we will both have careers, probably one — maybe two or three if we hop around a lot. That means officially laying to rest some of our childhood dreams. “I will never be an astronaut,” my friend said pointedly during our conversation, “or a veterinarian.” The fact of the matter is that hardly anyone will make a dent in that 34-job list that Holy Name’s fifth-grade class sang about so many years ago.

I think that this realization can be a difficult one to arrive at for many students, especially students who have been told all their lives that they have unlimited amounts of potential. Even if you are headed toward a career that you think you will really enjoy, it can be hard to part with the dream of being a prima ballerina, a monster truck driver or a NASCAR driver. We feel like we’re missing an opportunity when we let any door close, no matter how outrageous the opportunity was, because we’ve been conditioned to take on everything we see. Many of us have spent our lives piling more and more on our plates, without having to do much sifting. We didn’t have to choose between being the president of one club or the other because we could do everything. That means, though, that letting one of our interests or, worse, one of our natural gifts, fall to the wayside can sometimes be very difficult.

When faced with the prospect of a future where we may or may not actually live up to all our little dreams, it can be tempting to fret over details, hoping to earn the right to be all we are meant to be. As C.S. Lewis put it in “The Screwtape Letters,” “The future is not some promised thing which only favored heroes attain. It is something that everyone reaches at the rate of 60 minutes per hour, no matter who he is, no matter what he does.” Seeing that a future is not something we need to earn can take some of the stress out of moving through life’s stages and can let us close some doors and open others with confidence. I may never be an architect, manager, therapist, accountant, vocalist, astronaut, principal or nurse, but I can enjoy my 60-minute-per-hour ride toward the future, do my best in the present and have faith that my path through life will be the best one for me.

Sophia LeMaire is a mechanical engineering major from Longmeadow, Mass. She can be reached at slemaire@princeton.edu.