Upon wishing my students a fruitful end to their college-application season, I thought back to that time in my own life. I began to consider what is really important for a successful college career versus what I thought would be important when I was applying to university. There are the things we assume will be key to our success: going to a prestigious school, picking a solid major with a clear career path associated with it, getting a good summer internship.

But there are so many unknowns, which is one of the beautiful parts of going to university. The possibilities seem endless and it’s hard to top that feeling of unlimited potential that imbues the manicured landscape of your new home when you set foot on campus for the first time.

But all those opportunities and unpredictability mean that you don’t really know if, a few years from now when you are lining up for commencement, you will be following your original dream or taking a different career path. You don’t know how long you will remain in your first career. Or what revelations or other life-altering experiences you may have during your college education, that could radically shift your values or priorities. Or what people or significant others you will hopefully meet.

All of these important and inevitable adventures aside, there is another aspect of university that we sometimes don’t consider consciously and deliberately, but that is just as important. Moving away from home is, for most of us, our first significant opportunity to be independent from our parents long enough to mature into a functioning adult.

Ambling through campus on any given day, the word “adult” can feel far away in time and atmosphere from college life. But it is already there on your personal horizon – the responsibility for keeping yourself healthy, the accountability to yourself and others to succeed in class and other activities. University is an opportunity to form and solidify your independent self with your own morals, values, and life outlook.

It is also a time when you’ll be introduced to hundreds of people with varying life outlooks, and when you will join or consort with a variety of groups and communities that have different values, social etiquette, and cultures. With all of this possibility and variability, chances are that at some point, the following will occur:

• You will fall short of your own expectations in a big way
• You will fall short of someone else’s expectations in a way that is significant to them
• Someone else will seriously disappoint your expectations

When this happens, you have an opportunity to compare your expectations, their expectations, and the stated expectations of your campus community. Questions may arise in your mind: were those expectations reasonable? Where did they come from? You can learn a lot about yourself, your culture, and your values from these experiences.

However, there is also the matter the unmet expectations themselves. These situations can be destabilizing, even traumatic. When they happen during your transition to adult independence, these occurrences can have an unhealthy effect on your outlook or personal growth if you don’t have the resources to process them and learn from them.

I had an experience where I fell far short of my own expectations, and it haunted me for years afterward. What could have been an uncomfortable opportunity for me to stand up for myself and my values instead became a nuisance burden of shame that I carried about, inhibiting my own conception of myself as a competent adult.

The trouble began towards the end of my sophomore year. I had been serving as secretary of a student organization for the year and had put in my name to run for president of that organization the following year. It was one of those national organizations with student branches on most college campuses and it was affiliated with my major.

At the time I was running, the voting population of the organization was a bit ambiguous to me: was it the dues-paying members who made our activities possible, or was it the students of that major, for whom we designed and targeted our activities? If I had thought to read the bylaws of our student organization I would have found a good answer, but I didn’t. The outgoing president had a list of email addresses that he said corresponded to all the current students in the major. He would submit that list to the online election app so that all the students would have an opportunity to vote for the club’s next year of leadership, which is how the elections were usually run.

However, a couple weeks before he was to submit the list, he made an offhand joke about padding the list with some extra emails to sway the election because so many of the upperclassmen had a problem with the person running against me and because he felt that she had bribed the freshman class by stopping by their morning lecture with a big box of donuts. I told him not to do that and he moved onto another topic of conversation. I thought it was a joke that I had heard the end of. It wasn’t until several weeks after the election that I found out he was serious. He announced in a leadership meeting that he had padded the vote and told us not to speak of it to anyone. When I asked how many votes he had added and found out that his padding was what won me the election, I was disappointed and ashamed. I felt personally responsible that he had done such a thing and that my voice seemed not to matter.

But my own reaction made the situation much worse. My initial reaction was to feel unworthy of respect, given that he had already intentionally disrespected my stated value that he not interfere with the election and that he was now telling me to stay silent because my opinion still didn’t matter (to him). I felt ashamed of what he had done and afraid to discuss it with the faculty sponsor of our organization, who – from my isolated vantage point – seemed distant and uninterested. I had experienced some harassment over that school year and I became diffusely afraid of what would happen if I stuck up for myself by publicly ceding the election. And ashamed of being thought a troublemaker if I took time away from the faculty by asking them for advice on how to handle the situation.

This event could have been an opportunity for me to stand up for myself and my values, except that I couldn’t even get my own mind right. The other folks in my major just seemed relieved that my opponent had lost and my roommate seemed annoyed with me for even bringing up my problem. In retrospect, there were at least three ways that I could have personally resolved the moral dilemma and secured support for myself to weather any resulting criticism or harassment. But I didn’t know where to turn for the initial supportive brainstorming and discussion that I needed in order to act according to my idealized priorities.

I didn’t have a support system in place, and so I didn’t get the benefit of this trial life threw my way. Instead, I served the next year as if I had won, except that I subordinated myself to the vice president (who had run as the mate of the student who should have won), figuring that he had more of a mandate than I did for how we allocated our money and time in service of the students. And I carried a little ball of shame during that year and after for becoming part of a corrupt situation by not speaking out. It was a cowardly response and therefore did nothing for my confidence or progression to becoming a responsible adult.

How can you ensure that you benefit from these trials as you navigate your college experience toward an adult self? By ensuring you have the resources and confidence to live according to your desired values. Create a multi-layered support and mentoring system for yourself that grows with your throughout your years in university. You can start right when you get to university by taking a few steps that I’ll outline in my next post. And every semester or year, you can take inventory of your support network and update it as needed. Watch for my next post, about creating your personal support system, and a follow up post about accessing support from the administrative resources provided by your university.