For more than a decade, I've worked with college and graduate students at the University of Colorado Anschutz and the University of Denver. What I've found is that this period is often harder than most people expect — anxiety about the future, difficulty connecting with people they're drawn to, a sense that everyone else seems to have things more figured out than they do.
Some of what makes this period difficult is that the strategies that got someone here can start to work against them. Working hard, meeting expectations, staying self-sufficient don't always translate into knowing what you actually want or how to find a direction that feels like yours.
For graduate and professional students, the pressures often take a more specific form. Many have spent years moving between ambition and fear of falling short. When a first major setback arrives — a failed exam, a remediation, or feedback that calls your direction into question — it can feel completely disorienting. It forces you to question an identity that you’ve built your entire life around.
For those who are the first in their family to reach this level, there's an additional weight: navigating a world that doesn't speak the same language as home, with a sense that neither world fully understands what the other asks of them.
Therapy offers space to develop your own point of view — what you enjoy, the relationships you want, the direction that feels genuinely yours — and accountability to yourself rather than to anyone else's idea of what you should be doing.
If this is where you are right now, I'd be glad to talk.