Welcome to community college. Do you know where your towel is?

Douglas Adams, author of “The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy” coined that phrase while he was vacationing in Greece and all his friends were always waiting on him to find his towel.

College is one big, long transition, and it’s best to be prepared. Don’t be caught looking for your towel, or lost about what your next steps should be.

He began to think that someone who had it all together and really knew what they wanted was someone who knew where their towel was.

As a member of community college, many people are going to see you in one of two lights. The first is that you don’t know what you are doing and you are just trying to figure that out and still get college credits. The second is that they might look down on you for not being able to make it in “real college” or a university.

The people in the first category understand that almost no one knows for sure where their towel is when they first graduate high school. And it is important to take time to figure that out before spending a lot of money at a university.

The people in the second category are probably hiding the fact they haven’t known where their towel was in years.

Now for the most important thing you will read in this column. It is not a problem if you don’t know where your towel is. It is fine to take time to figure out what you love to do and what you want to learn to help you do what you love.

It is not only fine to do that, it is important.

The only time this becomes a problem is when you stop trying to find your towel or figure out what you want to do. Getting stuck in a rut is a huge problem and it is something to avoid at all costs. However, there is no better place to find what you like to do and potentially want to build a career doing than at community college.

Because here is the kicker.

You are in real college. You are figuring it out. You are hustling and working hard to better yourselves and your situation. And one day you will truly know where you should be and what you should be doing.

The best thing to do is block out people who tell you that taking the time to figure it out is a bad thing. Because you don’t want to work super hard and give your all only to find yourself, years later, still not knowing where your towel is or how you even lost it.

Welcome to community college. None of us has this one hundred percent figured out so let’s work on it together.

Go to your fellow students for advice and utilize student resources available at the Office of Student Engagement and Retention and your academic advisers. You got this.

—Macks Prewitt is a staff writer for the Et Cetera