“Copy of Copy of PLAN BUT I DROP PREMED”
That is the title of the final iteration of my four-year plan.
As I sit down to reflect on the last four years of my life at Hopkins, those are the words that echo in my mind. It’s a simple yet poignant summary of the twists and turns, ups and downs, As and “unsatisfactory”s, that have characterized my university experience. It’s a reminder of my wasted heartbreak taking Organic Chemistry and Physics, and of the meticulously scripted and practiced confession I wrote for my parents, anticipating their disappointment.
It’s a frightening thing to be young and alive. It’s one of the greatest privileges to be both, but how often do we know what to do with that? One of the curses of this experience is that it’s our first time being alive. Despite our AP Lang’s required reading of Malcolm Gladwell’s Outliers or the rabbit holes of wikiHow articles, there is no absolute guide on the decisions we make as we navigate our lives, and there are no undos, do-overs or takesies-backsies, which makes every decision we make feel deeply consequential. In trying to come to terms with that — the devastating, boot-shaking, very loose conceptual knowledge of free will — I cope by planning.
I've spent countless hours poring over my spreadsheet — meticulously planning out my trajectory and charting my path. I’ll do this, which will allow me to do this, which will give me the skills I need to do this, which will help me apply to this, and such, and so forth.
But the most life-impacting decisions I’ve made have happened off Google Sheets and mostly out of my control — a result of random chance. That’s why I have a love-hate relationship with the serendipitous chain of events that contribute to our lives. For one, serendipitous is such a scary word to spell, but how terrifying is it that luck plays so big a role in our lives — this unexpectable variable that, no matter how hard you try, you can’t plot out on a spreadsheet.
The friends that I’ve made at Hopkins have had an indescribable impact on both my experience and on who I am as a person. From the memories of laughing so hard I run out of breath and my lungs start hurting, to how they’ve shaped me and encouraged me to be more confident in myself, they’ve given me so much that an 800-word News-Letter article disguised as advice on planning can’t begin to show my appreciation.
They weren’t a part of my first four-year plan. I only met them through E-Board on a club — a club that I only applied to on a whim because someone I randomly reached out to on GroupMe to ask about transitioning to college recommended it. But in the late nights when my brain begins to spiral, I can’t help but imagine the “what-ifs.” What if I had reached out to someone else, joined a different club and never gotten close with those friends? Without them in my life, what different kind of person could I have become? What if I didn’t get waitlisted for Fundamentals of Epidemiology and missed out on the memories of pulling out a picnic blanket to sunbathe on Wyman Quad on Friday afternoons? The butterfly effect is real, but unfortunately I’m afraid of bugs.
There are things you cannot plan for, and there are things you should change your plans for. I say all of this genuinely, albeit hypocritically, as another tab peeks out on my spreadsheet entitled “Life Plan,” but there is little to do other than accept that inevitable chance. Some of it will be good and some of it will be bad, but you have to plan for your plan to not follow through — and that’s not necessarily a bad thing.
But in my opinion, the scariest thing about a four-year plan is how fast four years pass. Those eight 6:30 a.m. alarms to get ready for class registration are over before you realize it, and where you were once logging into the admissions portal with your friends surrounding, hoping to see the words “You’re In!,” you are now in your cap and gown saying your goodbyes to your friends and hoping they’re not goodbye forever.
For all the all-nighters on D-level wishing for it to be over, you never really imagined it would be over so soon. Of course, it was never perfect — there were decisions I should have made, decisions I shouldn’t have and things that didn’t go the way I hoped, but I don’t feel regret for those things. I like to think that there are no such things as mistakes — just interesting chapters in your future biography. Worst case scenario, we’ll try again in the next life.
As I get ready to graduate — furiously clawing at every aspect of my fleeting college life that I can — so deeply wishing everything could stay the same, as my friends depart for the rest of their lives, I can only oh-so-desperately hope that I have been a part of their four-year plans and will continue to be so in the next sets of four-years to come.
Kobi Khong is from Orange County, Calif. and is graduating with a degree in Public Health Studies.
