Taylor Hanigosky
tmh004@marietta.edu
What makes you feel the most alive?
It’s probably not updating your resume with a list of organizational skills or obsessively stalking online job postings and checking your email for responses from all those applications you submitted.
It’s no new revelation that, as college students, we’re all under a lot of pressure. And at the mercy of a stagnant economy and an ultra-competitive job market, this pressure may be disproportionately higher compared to previous generations of students.
Furthermore, the vast majority of American college freshmen cite the main benefit of a college education as an opportunity to increase their earning power. Yet, their emotional health levels have declined to new lows, 2014 according to the annual Freshman Survey by the Cooperative Institutional Research Program at UCLA.
In response to this high-stress environment, we asked Marietta College students to reflect on what makes them happy. Their answers range from simple pleasures to abstract ideas, reminding us all that, while getting a job is important, living in the present is just as fulfilling.
