What is your definition of the grey area? Would you say you are in it currently?

• “The grey area as I experienced it was basically stepping out of college. Having gone through essentially all the steps I was meant to go through in my academic career and feeling pretty wholly unfulfilled. It felt like there was a whole path laid out for me, especially because given the field I went to I did not have a lot of time for self discovery. I spent most of my life basically working towards a goal: graduating college and getting the job. It felt incredibly stressful because I believe I subconsciously knew that it was not all I was supposed to do. It led to a pretty tough mental time for me because everything up until that point had an expiration date. You are in elementary school and you know it is going to end in 5th grade. Middle school you know is going to end in 8th grade and then high school and so on. But, once you kinda step out into the world there is no expiration date, you are in it. It is very overwhelming to realize that the next steps are purely your own especially when you’ve been in a very structured academic environment.”
• ” I would say the grey area for me  would be when the path that was made for you ends and you have to define the rest of it. I would say I was in it for 2 ½ years, and I am still in it currently but, I see the light at the end of tunnel.”

Do you believe in happenstance or fate? Both? Or do you believe in another term?

• “I believe both actually. Specifically for me, on top of engineering I discovered that I was meant to be a musician, there is absolutely no taking the two apart for me. My personal belief is that if you equate this to kind of the tribal times everyone had their purpose within the tribe and I imagine that our brains know what that is. Whether our brains is to be a creative mind, a supportive mind ,to be a leader etc. If our lives our not reflective of what we are meant to do I believe it leads to a lot of mental issues and instability for us cause you are taking someone who was meant to do one thing and forcing them to do another. Maybe that person does not know what they are meant to do but I’m sure there some kind of dopamine receptors that are not being fired off that will show your brain, ‘okay this might be fine but this is not what this person was meant to do’. I think especially our generation feels that more than most because we have the opportunity to get so many quick dopamine fixes that it becomes so obvious when there is a big part of it that we are missing.”
• “So. I think that I like to avoid the term fate. I do not think it comes from a higher power. I think it is kind of an almost biological fate. For example, let’s say you are meant to be a carpenter and you never knew that you were meant to be a carpenter, or you were put on a track that took you nowhere near carpentry . Years down the road you may be an excellent electrician. But, you may not be as happy or fulfilled as you would have been if you were a carpenter.”

Post-Graduation, what were your feelings and thoughts?

• “I pretty much had mental crisis after mental crisis to be honest, it was very difficult. I guess the best way I could equate it to is if you were running a marathon and you reached the end and you won but then all the lights turned out and there was no one in the stands. Thats how it felt for me.”

Have your post- college thoughts differed from your pre- college thoughts? If so, why?

• “What I learned from college was different than what I thought I was going to learn from college. Walking into college I thought I was going to learn such an extensive understanding of engineering that I was going to be like an encyclopedia. What I figured out by the end was the key takeaway from college, was learning how to learn and learning how to deal with people. Due to that learning, upon graduation I felt I was greatly prepared for the world, just not in the way that I had expected.”

Is your post-graduation timeline still the same? If not, what changed?

• “Well, I did not really have a timeline because I could not even envision it. But, what has changed is my previous imagination of going to get the job and then that was going be it. I kinda reached a point in my professional career where I feel I can take a break in my professional career and do a little music. It is not so rigid anymore. I have a new respect for taking time to discover what I really want to do and I have realized life is not as rigid as it many seem.”

How would you define college?

• “College is what you make of it. College can be a 4 year summer camp or it can be a 4 year boot camp depending on a lot of factors you can get a lot or very little out of college. Your expectation management and viewing it with critical eye is very important.”