There are only three weeks left (roughly) until I am officially halfway through my college experience. I don’t think that it has hit me just yet, but I can feel the dread and despair right around the corner. While this impending deadline has brought about thoughts surrounding my post-grad plans — an uncertain future I was forced to confront at an advising meeting this week… let’s just say that I was not prepared to dive deep into the options I’ve kind-of-sort-of laid out for myself—the main debate I’ve been focused on is one of personal growth. Have I changed? Am I the same person who threw a frisbee into the middle of the Bald Spot almost two years ago? If I have changed, has it been for the better? 

Many people like to talk about the quintessential midlife crisis. Or even the quarter-life crisis. But, no one brings attention to the I-am-halfway-through-the-most-influential-four-year-

endeavor-of-my-life-what-have-I-accomplished crisis. I suppose that title begs the question: is college that important to identity development? Middle school sent me into an identity spiral. So did high school. And my mom always tells me that I won’t fully understand myself until I’m in my 40s. So, why does American society put so much value onto four years of undergrad? 

Part of it has to do with firsts. There’s this phenomenon called the reminiscence bump, a pattern I studied in depth throughout a psychology course that focused on memory. It refers to the concentration of well-held memories from young adulthood — right around one’s typical college years. So, for example, when looking back on your past at the ripe age of eighty, the most memories you’ll recall will be from around twenty years old. One of the theories explaining such an unproportionate bump is the series of unfamiliar events that define an individual’s life at this stage. First kiss, first relationship, first time moving out, first serious job, etc. Obviously, not everyone moves on the same timeline. But, there is a statistically significant pattern. 

So, I have gone through a lot of firsts. First time living with a roommate (other than my sister), first time writing a paper longer than ten pages, first time being away from home for longer than a week, first time leaving the country for an extended period of time. Does that mean that I’ve changed? I have had to adapt, troubleshoot, fall and get back up. But those were skills that I came into Carleton with, were they not? I wrote my entire Common App essay about learning how to be independent, how to advocate for myself and “fight the good fight.” Unless that was a total lie, these past two years cannot have been the first time in my life in which I effectively took on new challenges. Just because the ones I’m now facing are different from those of my past doesn’t mean that the individual facing them has changed. 

A significant roadblock in solving my debate may be the lack of concrete evidence to prove or disprove my potential development. All I have to look back on are videos accumulated on my phone or texts that have been long buried by new conversations. Though it is easy to notice strong distinctions between my behavior at, say, fourteen compared to now, such cannot be said with my eighteen-year-old self. Her voice is at the same octave, her vocabulary echoes mine and her tendencies — both flawed and virtuous — are remarkably similar. It is difficult to trust my peers, too. I have had conversations with both friends from home and Carleton about this unnamed (technically) crisis. All of them have assured me that I have in fact changed — just as I have assured them the same. Yet, when it comes to identifying where those changes show up, most of us fall short. It’s just… a feeling. 

When I fly back to Seattle and sit in the same car seats that I have for the past five summers as my friends and I drive to get dinner and ice cream, I know that things have shifted. Not in a bad way. Maybe not in a distinctly good way either. But, the dynamics that previously shaped our interactions have certainly morphed. The jokes we make, the topics we circle back to, the tensions that eventually pop up. I find it pointless to question if we still would have become friends if we met today, but it does enter my mind occasionally. However, whatever answer I could think of does not take away from the fact that we are all connected. Even if our past selves were connected through different means. 

At the end of the day — and this may be a bit meta — maybe the proof that I’ve changed is the fact that I can write this article at all. If you had asked the freshman-Fall Term version of myself to outline her defining character traits, she would have been stumped. Sure, there were a few identity markers I clung to: my obsession with organization, my extroversion, my optimism. But, so much more lay under the surface, unnamed. As I attempt, now, to use my current self as a frame of reference, my identity web has grown astronomically. I have many pieces of myself I can point to, both ones I hold pride in and ones that I work to dismantle every single day. Even though they were likely there all along, I didn’t have the experience nor the introspective practice to truly comprehend their influence on my thoughts and behavior. It is a gift to be able to understand yourself, for that means you can trust yourself. When I act, I act with purpose. And, like my mom has promised, I’m sure that feeling of security will only grow as I age into, eventually, my 40s. 

So, whether or not Carleton has changed me in my (almost) two years here, at least I can say that I would be able to more confidently identify any future developments. That is as good a spot as any to be at 20 years old. At least, I’ll keep telling myself that it is.