What’s up with that old saying that college is all about “finding yourself?” First of all, what does that mean anyway? Second, it’s not.

The best years of our lives aren’t always so because they somehow defined us as people. In fact, they may be so for precisely the opposite reasons. It’s not until you lose yourself that you’re able to be found. College shouldn’t be celebrated as the time in a person’s life when they magically find themselves. It should be when they get to be comfortable being un-found.

Developmental theory posits that an individual grows when they are challenged to think and act beyond their personal status quo, when they are pushed into a place of discomfort where they must confront new ideas, values and ways of being in this complex world. These challenges can be overwhelming and must be balanced by support that comes from a person’s peer group, community and physical environment. In the absence of support, an individual has no foundation upon which to stand in facing their challenges; in the absence of challenge, there is no motivation driving one to change or grow.

I can remember my father telling me (many times) as a young boy, “Craig, one day you’re going to grow up and realize you don’t know everything.” Then one day, I moved out on my own and away to college. My first year in college was nothing short of traumatic for me. I was overwhelmed and intimidated by the lack of authority in my residence hall. I was committed to my grades, and I was afraid to get to know my neighbors for fear of rejection when they discovered that I enjoyed the academic challenge of college, and that I was willing to trade nightlife for the Dean’s List. I considered transferring to a college where more people would understand my priorities.

For the first time, I remember worrying about doing well on tests. While I had been outgoing and, dare I say, popular in high school, I suddenly felt awkward and out of place. I was living on student loans and had to learn how to fill out my FAFSA form without my dad’s help. I lived with a friend of mine in the residence hall, and he was the first roommate I ever had. We had some very frustrating moments confronting the critical issues such as what temperature to keep the room at, what time to turn the lights off at night and who got to keep the room decorations that we had bought together. Amid all the chaos, drama and stress of my first year in college, I had discovered that I didn’t know everything.

Over the summer following my first year in college I broke the news to my father. He let out a foreboding belly laugh, and I felt strangely comforted, like I had been invited to a secret club whose only requirement for membership was that I let go of the gloriously naive sense of what I thought it meant to be me in this world, which brings me back to my two original questions.

I hope that you will not judge the worth of your college years on whether or not you become everything you hoped to be. Question instead, have you worked to make yourself available to be found? Have you deconstructed the ways in which you define yourself? Do you approach each day that you live and each choice that you make with intentionality toward being present and engaged in the process of simply becoming?

Now I am several years removed from my college years, and I find myself in a position to be involved in the lives of thousands of other college students. I continue to run into daily challenges I never thought I would run into, and for that I am forever indebted to the very students for whom I work. I only hope that you will, in turn, demand the same from me, from your community, from your professors and from yourselves. Seek support from your friends and family, from a counselor or chaplain, from your favorite television show or from playing your favorite sport. And own up to the challenges of the early mornings in class, the papers that seem like they will never get done, the difficult conversations that you are not quite ready to have and the choices that you know you need to make.

You should settle for nothing less from the best years of your life.

Craig Beebe is the associate director of Residential Life.