Opinion: Don’t make any commitments yet

Ever since I was a little kid, I never wanted to do anything else but become a commercial airline pilot. Every time I walked through an airport and boarded an airplane I knew that’s what I wanted to do with my life. Even watching airplanes fly over my car, I loved it.

This feeling stayed with me until about one week ago when I actually got to go up into an airplane and fly it myself with the help of a flight instructor. All it took was a matter of about 30 minutes to make me change my mind about becoming a pilot. I went 18 years of my life and based all my college around it all to have my plans change in no time.

I took off and all was fine. We climbed up to about 4500 feet and did a couple of turns, still all was fine. Then he said to do a steep turn which means turn the airplane anywhere from 45 to 60 degrees bank left or right. I began the steep turn but I was losing altitude so I had to pull back hard on the joystick. This is where things went haywire. Nothing happened to the airplane, but rather to me. I got the feeling of death. There was one point I don’t remember because I spaced out so bad from the feeling I got.  The feeling was a combination of death and not being in control of my body. I told the instructor right then and there it was time to go back to level ground.

All of my life I thought I wanted to fly and that’s it. I never could see myself doing anything else and still can’t. I based my whole life around this. I gave up on playing my love, college football, so I could fly. Now I am stuck in a dilemma with only one week left to change everything around.

Seniors always put such pressure on themselves to make a decision about what they want to do with the rest of their lives but why? It can all change in a matter of 30 minutes as I found out. Most people that are 30 to 35 years old still don’t know what they want to do with their lives.

My advice to any senior in high school or even college students is don’t spend all your time worrying and stressing  about what you want to do in life because it can change in a heartbeat. Work hard and get good grades, things will fall in place.