Author bio:
Bella Cox is one of two 2025–26 assistant news editors for Mustang News. When she isn’t gossiping with her fellow assistant news editor, Kaylin O’Connell, you can find her reading at Avila Beach.
My time in Mustang News narrows down to one lesson: there is no such thing as the perfect time to do anything. If you don’t open yourself up to new opportunities, you will continue passing up every good thing that comes your way, waiting for the perfect time to pounce at a fresh opportunity you could make your own.
I entered Cal Poly eager to write and find a community that would allow me to do so. But long story short, I didn’t get involved with Mustang News until I was a junior. I kept telling myself that if I just waited until I had a lighter workload or more writing samples from my journalism classes, then I would take the time to apply and be able to devote my attention to writing.
Looking back, I am kicking myself for being so silly! What a waste those two years were, sitting around, waiting for the perfect time to write to fall in my lap, when all I had to do was write for myself.
Writing will not come so easy if you do not put it to the test. Keep journaling, writing in the margins of books or writing letters to your loved ones, because the best exercise is indeed practicing what you are learning. You don’t learn to swim by reading about water.
That job you have been staring at in your saved LinkedIn posts? Apply for it. That cute person you sit behind in your 100+ lecture hall? Ask for their number. That trip that has been sitting in your high school friends group chat just waiting to be planned? Plan it. That girl you have been dying to befriend but don’t want to risk getting your heart broken because she is a year younger and won’t graduate with you? She’ll make you laugh and cry, befriend her. And just like that, you’ll be graduating college wondering what could have been.
Soon, I will attend the University of the Arts London – London College of Fashion to earn my master’s in fashion journalism and content creation in the fall. (Yup, just add me to the neverending list of women in rom-coms who work as fashion journalists. How stereotypical of me.) I could not be more excited to go live abroad. But is this the perfect time to leave for a year to get my master’s? Who’s to say?
There is no perfect time to apply, go abroad, travel as much as possible or start a relationship. Perfect comes later. Perfect is realizing you did good using that time to live your life to the fullest. What are you waiting for?
