A Senior's Farewell

So, I guess it’s that time. Finals are in full-swing. We’re attempting to study, but really we’re trying to make sure we complete our bucket lists and simply enjoy ourselves before we head home. Or graduate, when it comes to us seniors. (Insert sad face here).

I thought I’d write one more blog post before I leave Tufts to say a final goodbye. “Final words” have always intimidated me, and to be honest, I don’t quite have anything particularly profound to say. I’m not sure anything really could be said. I knew senior year would whiz by extremely fast, so I’m not exactly surprised that I’m already planning my final weekends and talking commencement and graduation gowns. But truth be told, I haven’t yet been overwhelmed by the apocalyptic feeling that my carefree youth is ending. Maybe it just hasn’t hit me yet and I’ll be a bawling, inconsolable mess in no time. Or maybe there’s a part of me that’s ready to move on----to explore new cities, work on real-world projects, and be refreshingly anonymous for a change.

Of course, when people ask how I feel about graduating (a.k.a. absolutely everyone), I can’t exactly answer them in a direct, sensible fashion. My answer always transforms into some senseless garble filled with ehhhs and sortas, leading my questioners to reply with vigorous affirmations about how I’m just gonna love the career world. Sure, I have visions of myself reveling in the delights of “real-life” ( largely thanks to Sex and the City), but I’m aware that it’s not one big cocktail party. When I ask graduates to compare career-life to college (praying they’ll say it’s just plain awesome), I get the same answer: it’s not better or worse, but different. No more sleeping away your 9:00 am class or showing up to your 10:30 in sweats. No more 2-hour lunches and long gaps of free time. At the same point, there’s no traditional “homework” (aside from leftover work) and weekends are blissfully free. And there’s the gratification of working toward more than a passing grade; your contributions make a real impact.

I’m lucky enough to have some sense of what life will look like next year. I’ll be working at a public affairs firm in NYC, hopefully living in a cozy apartment with a roommate from high-school. If things go according to plan, I’ll hopefully have a nice circle of friends, a decent relationship with my landlord, and some sense of how to navigate NYC subways. But even with some sort of “plan”, things still look fuzzy. I can’t picture what my life will be like until I’m in it full-swing, and even then I’ll probably be too overwhelmed by the newness of it all to fully reconcile it.

Come the sad notes of graduation music, chances are it will hit me, big time, and I’ll probably be a big huge mess when it does. Even now part of me feels obliged to run up to underclassman and beg them to appreciate it. (Preliminary words of advice: sleep late, steal all the food you can from Dewick, and snag the biggest off-campus room you can find). But given all the emotion and the trauma, we will inevitably find our niche and adjust. Even if right now the thought of becoming a real-person feels hilariously impossible. Someone once reassured me that once we get used to the fact that we’ve graduated, the real-world feels natural and plain right, as if this is what we’re “supposed” to be doing. The advice was vague, but I remember it feeling refreshing at the time, and I thought I’d pass it along.

In all my on-and-off-again panic, the most important advice I have is to be honest with yourself. We’ve had four years to explore and discover our skills and interests and goals, and now it’s time to go after them. We’re too good to abandon our idealist college ambitions simply because it comes with a challenging road. In the same vein, don’t expect it to be easy. There will be stresses and frustrations that are totally new to us, and we should be prepared to take them in stride. These are the moments that we’ll be laughing about some years down the line, when everything finally starts to make some sense.

And it will happen. I’ve had many friends promise that college wasn’t the best four years of their life, but that (gasp) it keeps getting better from here. So, fellow seniors/soon-to-be alums: let’s assume that we’re at the beginning of something great.