As I get to the end of my college career, I am, like every senior before me, incredibly daunted by the fact that I am going to have to go do something with my life. Like, very soon. 

All the seniors are at different places with our future plans, and some of us have better ideas about what we want to do than others. I am one of those with nothing concrete, with no goals. 

It sounds scary, but the more reflection I’ve done over the past few months, I’ve realized that I really just don’t have any big goals. I have small goals, which are also important to focus on, and while I do need large goals to ultimately keep me going in life, small goals are what I’m into at the moment. 

This editorial goes along with the biggest issue I’ve seen from The Record in the last four years — 16 pages. As this issue has gotten closer, several people have asked me why, why are you doing a double issue? What are you trying to accomplish?

The answer is that the goal was to do a double issue, just to see if we could. Normally, The Record does a 12 page issue once per semester. The idea to do 16 popped into my head, and I couldn’t say no. Maybe that’s a bad reason, but it’s the truth. 

Sometimes it’s worth doing things for your craft, just because you can. Sometimes, you need to set a short term, arbitrary goal, just to see if you can do it.

At the start of my sophomore year, on a Monday afternoon, I created a note on my phone called “Record editorial ideas.” Over the following two and a half years I added all sorts of random things to it, from notes about writing style, to actual ideas that turned into editorials. My first editorial of the semester, about giving, started as a note in my phone that said “Goshen college shouldn’t ask me to donate money.”

There’s also a lot of nonsense in there, things that I don’t remember what they meant. What was it I wanted to say about the GC residential experience? I have no clue, but at one point I thought it was worth writing down. 

The point though, isn’t about whatever nonsense I typed out over those few years. It’s that this note on my phone has served as a reminder to me of a goal, getting to the point where I could write these editorials. It’s stared me in the face every time I opened my notes app over the last two years, a reminder of what I was working towards. 

It’s also silly of me to think that I can just pull big goals out of nowhere. Setting small, short term goals helps guide larger, long term goals. I don’t know what I want to do with my life, overall, but it’s okay because accomplishing my short term goals will help me figure out what I want to do. 

The best thing you can do to figure out what you want to do with your life is to go work a job you definitely don’t want. I spent a few summers cutting up scrap metal, sweating like crazy, standing all day in front of a saw that gave me headaches from the noise. Doing that helped nudge me along with journalism, inspiring me to work hard, to be the executive editor, to hopefully, someday, get paid to do this.