College was never supposed to be the “best time of my life.” At least, I never entered freshman year with that thought process. I wanted to get in and out of university as quickly as possible.
Those are the words of Abigail Beck, a journalism major and rising senior at ASU. Earlier this year, she published a letter to her teenage self in State Press Magazine, hoping to counter the generalized advice about college she remembers reading when she was 18. Now 21, she’s been reflecting on what she thought her college experience would be, and how different those expectations were from what it’s actually become.
As we enter the late summer period when thousands of incoming freshmen descend upon the ASU campus, Beck sat down with The Show for a conversation about the parts of college life that no one prepares you for.
Full conversation
ABIGAIL BECK: I went to a very accelerated high school. We had like all honors program, all advanced placements, and there was a lot of pressure on just being the best and doing the best. And I carried that pressure very quickly into college. And I was like, “OK, I just want to do the best that I can. I want to get out in the field and I want to like, do hard journalism and I want to get there quick.”
I definitely when I came in, I was like, “Oh, I’m going to ace this. This is going to be easy. I Just a quick three or four years and I’m out of here.”
SAM DINGMAN: So at some point in kind of tracking your narrative through the piece, you go from this feeling that this is this 3-4 year task that you’re going to accomplish, you’re going to achieve it — which is a lot of pressure to put on yourself.
BECK: Yeah.
DINGMAN: To then putting a lot of pressure on yourself to make the most out of college. You’ve got to go out. You’ve got to make friends. You’ve got to have really good grades. And that all of a sudden feels like something you need to achieve. How did you find balance between those impulses?
BECK: I didn’t for a while. I didn’t. I would spend time with my friends, but the thing is I’d be thinking about all the schoolwork that I had to do. And it was kind of just this, like really suffocating perspective to have to really hold yourself to those standards.
And I think that a lot of people do that because especially in my major — I know it’s true for a lot of other majors — there’s a lot of pressure to really be in every single like form of journalism clubs, and you should take them all and head on, and you should be an editor and all of them, and you should just always be thinking journalism 24/7.
And I think that started to get to me too. Trying to give 100 to everything all the time is never going to work, but it kind of had to hit me hard before I had to realize that.
DINGMAN: Well, not to make that obvious or cringe inducing segue here, but I know that at one point you were involved in a car accident. You write about this in the piece. Yeah. And it seems like that was a pretty transformational experience for you.
BECK: Yeah. Yeah. So I was actually driving to do an interview for a class that I had, a reporting class. And I was driving early in the morning, and I never drove at that time. And I was in my car that I really loved. It was a 2009 Jeep Commander. It was my mom’s old car, and I loved that car.
But I basically got rear-ended really bad. My car was totaled. It was done immediately after. One of the tires came off, the headlight came off. And so I was really grateful to that big, giant car for protecting me.
But I was also thinking, my first car was much smaller. It was a Chevy Spark, and it was yellow. And I remember thinking to myself, I was like, “What if I was in that car?” And so I realized from that to slow down a little bit. And I didn’t talk about this in (the letter), but actually a few months later, I was walking downstairs in ASU’s Memorial Union, I missed a step, and I broke a bone in my foot.
DINGMAN: Oh my God.
BECK: But instead of that making me so upset, I kind of made a joke out of it, honestly. I had a boot on and everything, and I was kind of just like, “Oh, you know, well, I have to style this, I guess, with my outfits, but, you know, you have to take it off when I drive, which is annoying.”
And so I think that that has helped me a lot. And it’s really just helped me to like, appreciate where I’m at in life instead of constantly thinking about the next thing, the next thing, the next thing, because that’s my problem. Kind of being where my feet are. Not to be cliche.
DINGMAN: That doesn’t sound cliche at all to me. I mean, that’s the reason I’m really interested in this incident that you shared. Because I hear you telling in your story, you’re saying that you got there and you were like, kind of already living in the future. You were already at the end, mentally.
And then you got into this place where you were in the present, but you were in like too many different presents at the same time — like class, friends, grades, all of these things. And it seems like this incident put you in this place of realizing like, “Oh, this is also my life.”
And if I may, it made me think of a piece of advice that my dad gave me when I went to college that came back to me in reading your piece, which is he said, “You have to remember, you also live there.” And for that reason, one of the details that you shared in the piece that just really stuck out to me is you say, now the best part about college, is you go grocery shopping, you clean your apartment.
And I don’t know — to any of the 18-year-olds that may be listening who are about to go to college, those things probably don’t sound pleasurable, but it’s such an important lesson of growing up is that what’s appealing about those things, I think, is the sense that you’re in your life. You are taking care of yourself. You’re doing these things.
BECK: Yeah, I think there’s a lot of beauty to be found in the mundane tasks that you do. Just enjoying the things that make me feel like I’m not playing adult anymore. Instead, I’m actually being an adult.
DINGMAN: Yeah. You came in — it sounds like, and I did this, too — with this idea of what an adult does. And here you are with this much different interpretation and experience of what an adult does. But as evidenced by the fact that you’re going to be the managing editor of the State Press next year, it’s not like you had to give up on your dreams in order to become this different kind of adult.
BECK: Yeah. And I think these big things happen, but little things happen too. Friendships fall apart. You date people, and then you break up with people. And things are constantly changing when you’re at this age, and it’s not going to stop. It’s just starting. And I think I realized that pretty quickly, too.
DINGMAN: I guess as a last question, I’m wondering: Having cultivated all this self-awareness, gone through all these experiences, do you feel like you’re looking at the next phase of your life after graduation differently than you were looking at your future when you came into ASU?
BECK: Yeah, I think so, because I’m not trying to rush anything anymore. Graduating and entering the career field or grad school — I don’t know what I’m going to do.
DINGMAN: There it is, right there. You don’t know what you’re going to do. That’s great.
BECK: Yeah. And I don’t and I don’t really know, but I’m OK with not knowing. And I think that’s the difference is not having this 5-year plan of “This is what I’m going to do, and this is where I’m going to go, and this is the city I’m going to live in, and this is what my life’s going to look like.” Because I didn’t think that my life would look the way that it does now.
And maybe if I’d seen it when I was a freshman, I’d be like, ‘Oh, she’s kind of boring sometimes.” But I’m not boring. I’m just content. I’m just kind of walking through life rather than trying to sprint it out.
DINGMAN: Well, one thing that we do know the future holds for Abigail Beck is that she will be the managing editor of State Press going into this year and is a former reporter at State Press Magazine. Abigail, thank you so much.
BECK: Thank you.
