Under Pressure: The College Stress Test

On graduating, uncertainty, and learning to sit with the space between who you were and who you’re becoming.

Graduation doesn’t happen precisely how you expect it to. There’s no dramatic finish line, no victory lap… one day you’re juggling responsibilities with studying for and taking finals, anticipating final grades, and telling yourself all the while, you’re almost there. Then suddenly, it’s all over. The adrenaline that you carried through finals, projects, and that insufferable survival mode disappears, and you’re left standing still, asking yourself a question that feels both simple and yet impossible:

What now?

No one really prepares you for the crash that comes after the accomplishment. You spend years working toward a degree, maybe even switching majors along the way to find something you’re more passionate about, ultimately believing that crossing that threshold will unlock clarity. Instead, it often opens into silence. It opens into a strange, weightless space where the structure is gone but the expectations remain. Graduation doesn’t come with a roadmap—and that realization can be quite unsettling—especially when you’re already an adult.

Here’s the part we don’t talk about enough: for many of us, graduation doesn’t happen at age twenty-two, with a safety net waiting quietly offstage to catch us and ease us gently into the world. It happens later, layered on top of rent and utility payments, full-time work, debt, health concerns, and real responsibility. You don’t “become” an adult after graduation; there is no “initiation” to welcome you into the world of adulting—you’re already there. And somehow, adulthood seems to just level up overnight.

You’re expected to pivot seamlessly, to know your next move, to translate years of effort and determination into a single, marketable version of yourself—and to do it with sheer confidence.

But confidence is hard to manufacture when the path forward feels so unclear.

Then, there’s the emotional whiplash of the job/career search—the strange disconnect between being told you’re doing everything right and still hearing “no.” You prepare, you research, you stress, practice, interview, and even walk away feeling hopeful. Sometimes you’re even told you did amazingly, that you aced the interviews, had amazing academic accomplishments, and excelled at their cognitive assessments—that you checked every box. And yet, the outcome does not change.

Rejection has a way of making you question things that had felt solid just days earlier. Not your work ethic—but your fit. Your presentation, your identity. You start wondering if something small, something unrelated to your qualifications and abilities, has quietly outweighed everything you confidently brought to the table.

That uncertainty is exhausting; and it’s compounded by the pressure to stay positive, to keep applying, to “keep pushing” forward without a breather to acknowledge how heavy this moment actually is. We’re told to trust the process, but no one explains what to do with yourself while you’re waiting in limbo.

This in-between space—the pause after achievement and before direction—is deeply uncomfortable (and confronting). It’s easy to see it as failure, or stagnation, or proof that somehow you missed a crucial step that everyone else understood. But more often, it’s just transition… and transitions are rarely tidy.

Maybe, just maybe, “what now?” isn’t a demand for an immediate answer. Maybe it’s permission to sit with uncertainty without treating it like a personal flaw; to recognize that confusion doesn’t erase accomplishment, and rejections don’t equate to incompetence or invalidate effort. Maybe not knowing your next step doesn’t mean that you simply aren’t moving forward at all.

Graduation marks an ending, that’s for certain—but it also creates space. Space to recalibrate; to rest; to grieve this chapter of your life that is now over; to imagine something different, even if that picture is still a bit blurry around its edges.

If you’re standing in that space right now, finished, exhausted, hopeful, disappointed, proud, unsure—all the things—you’re not behind the game. You’re not broken. You’re not failing.

You’re just between chapters.

And maybe, right now, that’s enough.