At the end of this semester, I will be officially done with my major. I will have enough credits to graduate next December. I will probably buy a suit in the next few months or so to have ready for job interviews. My college life is slowly dwindling away, and I am absolutely terrified.

I am only a junior. I still have another year of school left. I have two more spring breaks, one more summer, and lots and lots of tests and papers ahead of me. Yet, somehow, anytime I think about the fact that in a little over a year, I will be facing the ‘real world,’ I get the chills.

My mind races with a million terrifying questions. Have I made the right choices? Is this the best major for me? Will I be able to support myself? How am I going to be able to pay off my student loans? Where will I live? Where will I work? Will I have had the best college experience possible? Will my job provide dental care? (That thought is thanks to my mother). I guess my fears and questions are natural, but nevertheless, sometimes I realize that once college ends, I am supposed to be a grown-up, even though a lot of the time I feel like I am nowhere near ready for that.

One of my friends is getting married in a little over a year. She is planning a regular wedding, not some shotgun affair, and when I told my parents about it, they didn’t say anything about her being too young or getting married too soon. I realized that is because she will be 22 and lots of people get married at that age. Twenty-two is a grown up age. Maybe that age is too early for some people to get married, but it is not unheard of or crazy; in fact, it is rather normal and that is what is so scary to me.

I was looking online one day at a sight about financial planning. It said that you should start saving for retirement as soon as you graduate from college. There was a statistic about a Roth IRA that says you should put $2,000 a year ($38.46 a week) in an account starting at age 22, so that by the time retirement comes around, you will have $3.5 million. Now, $3.5 million sounds like a lot of money, but with inflation, by the time we retire in 50 years, it will probably not even be enough for a comfortable retirement. It is so scary that in the so-called beginning of your life, your early twenties, you already should be thinking about the end of your days. We need to think about our retirement before our parents even retire. It is absolutely frightening.

I feel bombarded with things I should do now and in the next few years in order to make sure that I have a secure future: save for retirement, go to grad school, buy life insurance, invest in the stock market and get a great job. Yet, at the same time, there are all sorts of other options out there, that people our age are supposed to explore, such as the Peace Corps, world travel, trying out different jobs, driving across the United States and volunteering to save the world. I know that there are some things that need to be done when you are young, because you probably will never get a chance to do them again, such as backpacking across Europe or working on a humanitarian effort in Africa. However, there are these other terrifying things that are thrown at us, such as if you don’t start preparing for retirement right out of school, you will be way behind. Now the young cannot even enjoy their youth.

I guess we are in the midst of one of the most exciting and at the same time most terrifying periods of our lives. The opportunities are endless, it seems, and there are many paths that I can take. I just have to believe that what is meant to work out will and that destiny will guide me. Until I know what is going to happen, however, I guess these worries will continue to keep me awake at night.

Laura Siciliano is a Collegian Columnist.