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A Look Back: 10 Years Since College Graduation

A Decade Ago ...

This month marks 10 years since I graduated from college. Though it's a weird mile-marker (round-numbered birthdays and anniversaries usually feel fraught with significance), it's also an interesting vantage point from which to reexamine my own college experience. It seems a useful time to reflect on what I did right in college, what I wish I'd done differently.

A Long (Longer Than I Expected) List of Regrets

So, to start with, I should tell you that I took college academics very, very seriously. In fact, if you were to ask me what I was most devoted to in college, the answer would be easy: learning everything I could about American history, and trying to be a great girlfriend. Actually, I was kind of obsessed with my studies (and I was also pretty obsessed with my boyfriend — more on that below). In part, the academic obsession was a good thing: I was passionate about the classes I was taking, and I wanted to learn as much as possible. That obsession led me to get a Ph.D. and pursue a career teaching other obsessed young students.

And yet, in hindsight, I wonder if I wasn't a bit too obsessed. I didn't really have any hobbies, and that tendency has stuck with me — I'm still pretty consumed by the topics I write and teach about, and I still don't have any hobbies (so much so that when, during a recent job interview, I was asked what I liked to do for fun, I had trouble coming up with anything besides reading, which was a little pathetic. Shouldn't I have some other interest? Snowboarding? Herb-gardening? Karate?).

It's great to love your studies, but I'm starting to think that it might be nice to do "what I do" a little less, and finally get around to developing that hobby. (You'll be pleased to know that in an attempt to take my own advice, I've recently signed up for a dance class at the studio down the block from my house.)

I'm also somewhat ambivalent about how I interacted — or, more to the point, didn't interact — with my family during college. You know how some people say college is a time for separating from your family? Well, I definitely separated, getting about as geographically and culturally far away from my family as possible. Oh, I went home to visit a few times a year, but I pretty much shut my family out of what was really going on in my life.

In part, this separation was good and necessary. As my pastor recently said to me, "it was age-appropriate. Separating from your family is part of what you're supposed to do in your late teens and your 20s." And, in fact, it may be all that separating that allowed me to, as a post-college adult, forge a pretty strong relationship with my family. That's also age appropriate, said my pastor: Once you've established your own identity during college, you can return to your family after college and develop a new kind of adult relationship with them.

Still, I think I went overboard in my separating. If I could go back and change things, I would separate a little less — I would make a few more visits home, I would call a little more frequently, and I would at least try to share what was really going on in my life with my family.

Here is the number one thing I regret about college — and it's actually a regret, not about something I did in college, but about something I've failed to do after college. I have done a lousy job of staying in touch with college friends. By way of illustrating how removed I am from my college friendships, I recently learned that my sophomore roommate, someone I still adore but am not in touch with regularly, has an 8-month-old daughter — I hadn't even known she was pregnant! In fact, I have only consistently stayed in touch with one friend from my undergrad years.

Now, there were some particular life circumstances that exacerbated the dissolution of my college friendships. For starters, I became a Christian, which strained a lot of my college friendships. Second, as I mentioned earlier, during college I invested a huge amount of time and energy in dating relationships. Finally, during the two years after college, I lived in England; most of my college friends were still in New York, so regular meals with college buddies weren't really an option.

Even given those circumstances, my failure to cherish relationships with my college friends deeply saddens me. There are things I could have done differently both during and after college that would have made a big difference. To put it simply, I could have devoted a little less time to my boyfriend and a little more time to my girlfriends, and I could have made visits and phone calls a higher priority after graduating. They did have e-mail in England, even in 1997. I could have used it more for keeping up with friends (and less for, um, flirting with the new boyfriend).

So: Did I Do Anything Right During My College Years?

That was a somewhat sobering litany — it turns out there are a lot of things I would do differently if I could roll back the clock to my college years. But I don't, of course, feel only regret when I look back at college. In fact, there are many things I did during college that still amaze me.

I took phenomenally interesting classes with totally brilliant professors. I developed a taste for Ethiopian cuisine. I learned some basic adult skills, like paying my bills on time. I learned that I loved some of the same things my parents love (like opera), and I was able to say with clarity that I really didn't enjoy some of the things my family loves (like hiking and college sports). I'm also grateful for the wisdom I had to not do certain things while in college, like drugs or running up credit card debt. And the friendships, and relationships with teachers, that I have managed to maintain from my college years are constant gifts to me.

The aspect of my college life for which I'm most grateful is something that happened almost by accident. Almost from day one of college, I was involved in the life of the community beyond my college campus. That involvement included a deep and important relationship with a local family who lived about two miles from campus, tutoring at a local elementary school, interning at a historically preserved home a few miles from campus, and taking part in Manhattan's larger cultural scene.

All this was engaging and enriching at the time (it's pretty cool to take art history and then, given that your local museum is the Met, be able to go spend an hour staring at the very painting about which your professor was just lecturing). And getting involved with the larger community stood me in good stead after college, because after four years of community involvement, I had become a person who more or less took for granted that I should — and would — engage the larger community.

One of the less-than-obvious benefits of all this community involvement during college was that I got to hang out with people who weren't my age. To be honest, I think it's a little weird for 18 to 22-year-olds to get to know only other 18 to 22-year-olds, and my forays beyond campus kept me in constant contact with older adults — the director of education at the house at which I interned, the teacher who taught the fifth-grade class in which I tutored, the family who more or less adopted me.

The opportunities to hang out with older people (and younger people, in the case of the fifth-graders!) has had a lasting effect — even shaping how I think about church. I admit I have something of an allergic reaction to local churches that organize Sunday school and other fellowship opportunities around strictly demographic lines, so that the single 20-somethings all hang out with other single 20-somethings, the empty nesters hang out with other empty nesters, and so forth.

Regrets and Growth

I'm not able to attend my 10-year reunion. But I am trying to celebrate my graduation anniversary in a different way — by giving thanks to God for the amazing experiences I did have during college, and trying to take that list of regrets and apply it to the present.

C O F F E E  S H O P

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What advice do you have for your fellow college classmates?

Join the discussion!

Having regrets isn't all bad; regrets, after all, suggest growth and development. (Think how weird it would be if, because you didn't change at all in your 20s, you could look back from age 30 and think you'd done everything just right …) So I expect, and even hope, that I'll have some regrets about this current decade when I look back ten years hence.

But I hope I have different regrets, and fewer (after all, you're not doing much growing or developing if you keep making the same darn mistakes — or just as many).

So on that note, I'm off to my dance class … and maybe, when that's done, I'll call up an old college friend.