Tufts Blogs

Do you smell something?

It smells like the fresh scent of new beginnings.

As we head into the summer and think ahead, it is time to create goals and aspirations to prepare for the upcoming academic year. When creating my goals, I always think about rebranding myself. How can I be more fashionable, more confident, more outgoing, more this, more that?  

College is yet again a time in our lives when we can rebrand ourselves. If there’s a childhood nickname that you’re trying to ditch or an embarrassing story that has traveled through high school, college can be the place to start anew. Alongside the list of items to bring to college, think about who you are today and the kind of person that you want to become. College isn’t only about finding what career you want to pursue, but also about finding who you want to become.  

(Reminder: You don’t need to have everything figured out by the end of your academic career).

So far, my path of rebranding has made me feel like I’ve gotten lost at every twist and turn… and my GPS started speaking an unfamiliar language. I’m driving in an unfamiliar place without any sense of direction or intentionality on where I’m going. It’s kind of like throwing a dart in the dark and hoping by pure luck that it lands on the dartboard. During my first semester of college, I made it my mission to get out of my comfort zone and be the best version of myself. 

What was my plan, you ask?

I didn’t have one. I was the dart hoping to land on the board. Of course, my first route of action was to join a play; I was *not* a theatre and drama kid in high school by any means, but I felt like this was the perfect time to give it a try. Long story short, I ended up participating in a virtual play as the main character in one of the scenes, and it hurts a bit to say, but I didn’t memorize all of my lines until days before the play, and that’s only because I treated my lines like a big game of reverse Pictionary where I drew symbols to represent main themes in a given line and guessed the words from that alone.

After this amazingly bizarre experience, I decided to switch lanes because this task aided in doing something that made me uncomfortable, but it was lacking intention. Experiences like this allow me to go beyond my wheelhouse and understand what is required of me: to be afraid, to be courageous, and to have the desire to grow and change. 

A significant part of my growth is attributed to journaling because I enjoy visibly seeing my progression in my line of thinking and how I conduct myself. The only way that I have been able to genuinely grow is by understanding why I am the way I am in this current moment and being okay with that. In conjunction with being intentional, I give myself the grace to just “be” and be present with my emotions. Oftentimes when I’m in a state of ‘just be’ (if it can be called that?), I’m normally doing something that I genuinely enjoy, something that requires no additional work, effort, or brainpower to do. 

Throughout my Tufts experience, I have started to redefine and rephrase how I understand what rebranding means for me. For example, before, my goals consisted of how others could perceive me as more [insert desirable trait here]. Now, my goals consist of how I can be more intentional, forthcoming with what I want, accepting of what is, and overall a better version of myself. Somehow, I opened a new door when I started centering myself at the forefront of my existence.