Somewhere along the way, we were handed a very specific timeline for adulthood: graduate high school at 18, finish college or university in your early 20s, and get a job to start building a career. By your mid-20s, you’re, apparently, supposed to know exactly what you’re doing.
But walk around a college campus and that timeline falls apart pretty quickly.
Some students start post-secondary education immediately after high school. Some take a year off. Some begin at 18 and realize a few years later that they want to change programs. Some pause their education to work, raise children, or deal with circumstances they never expected. Others return to school in their 20s, 30s, 40s or beyond. And then there’s everyone whose education was disrupted by COVID-19.
I graduated high school during the pandemic and eventually had to return to complete academic upgrading. I started at Camosun when I was 20 and spent my first two semesters here upgrading my math and chemistry before I could take the required courses for my program. I know people who paused their education during COVID and started post-secondary later. For some students, online learning made an already difficult transition even harder. An entire generation had its education interrupted, and we’re still living with the consequences.
Even without a pandemic, education rarely follows a perfectly predictable schedule.
You cannot always graduate as planned if the courses needed are not offered or clash with scheduling. Programs get cut or restructured. Courses are reduced. Required classes fill up. Sometimes a prerequisite is only offered once a year, and missing it means waiting another two semesters to take the next course in the sequence. Sometimes two required courses are scheduled at the same time, forcing you to choose which one to take first. Your graduation date can depend on factors completely outside your control.
Yet students often internalize these delays as personal failures. We look at someone who graduated before us and wonder what we are doing wrong. We compare ourselves to friends who already have careers or people online who seem to have their entire lives planned.
But behind whom are we supposed to be?
There is no universal finish line. Someone graduating at 22 isn’t inherently more successful than someone graduating at 25. Someone who starts college at 18 is not particularly more prepared than someone who begins at 30. Someone who changes careers at 35 hasn’t failed because they didn’t choose the right path when they were still in their teens.
Life is not a race where everyone starts at the same place, follows the same route, and crosses the same finish line.
For students, uncertainty is not evidence of failure. Neither is changing programs, taking a break, upgrading courses, returning to school, or simply needing more time.
Post-secondary education does not have an expiration date. Neither does figuring out what you want to do with your life. The timeline we were handed is outdated. Our lives are not.
So whether you’re 18 and just starting, 25 and changing direction, 35 and returning to school, or somewhere else entirely, you are not behind. There is no timeline. There is only your life at stake, and you’re allowed to take the time you need to build it.