Fifth-year seniors are prepared for anything. We know which professors are bluffing about pop quizzes and which ones mean business, and we know that it’s going to rain for two weeks straight in the middle of the school year. We can walk through campus blindfolded and point out which buildings have been erected overnight. Perhaps the only thing we are good for is telling you that Ledden Auditorium is what used to be HSS 2250 (renamed after the late Muir Provost Patrick J. Ledden). We remember planning our freshman fall quarter schedules with paper and pencils, and standing in line to get little square stickers that proved you had paid your dues to the UC regents. We remember the time when “S” spots were not endangered and plentifully covered the land. We have learned to plan ahead for parking, and we have our umbrellas. Bring it on.
The only thing we’re not prepared for is the barrage of acquaintances trying to coax us out of the university. Those insidious jabs can sneak into any conversation. It usually goes something like, “Hey …? Uh, aren’t you supposed to be gone by now?” Sometimes they’re loaded with thinly veiled indignation, as in, “What happened? I thought you were done.”
We’re lepers, we know. Stop throwing it at us. Before you shoot another one of those verbal gems, pretend we’re disfigured. Now gauge the appropriateness of such comments.
“Super-seniors” have committed the grievous sin of violating your expectations. We came here under the clear and unstated assumption that we would leave in four years, and yet here we are, freeloading off the state and filling up your classes. Some of us have good reasons, some don’t. There are engineers who stubbornly insist on graduating from ERC. There are the biology majors who have waited until their senior year to take that one lab, and got screwed over when those previously spacious and student-free labs became overcrowded with sophomores and their newfangled mandatory requirements. There are superseniors who jumped on the multiple-major bandwagon, or those that were too scared to venture forth into the real world.
To be brutally honest, every supersenior is a little scared of going into the real world. The sad part about taking a fifth year is putting off the real world and avoiding inevitable change. For fifth years, as my friend TJ likes to tease, it is like “the move-on train is leaving and you’re not on it.” The vast majority of your same-age peers move away, if they haven’t already. Even with those who stick around to work, if your friendship didn’t evolve past the UCSD-based activities you shared, it can get awkward. You can only do the “remember that time we …” so many times.
College is supposed to be the transition to adulthood, and that is frightening. Financial independence is tricky. There are all these things you can do with your life, and all these things you can do to mess it up. It’s harder to make friends out of college, but it starts to get harder to make friends in college.
You would think there isn’t much difference between fifth years and freshmen, but perhaps it’s a testament to the effectiveness of a college education that there is. There is a lot of maturation that happens in those four or five years, and the gap in interests become increasingly glaring. Drunken frat parties just lose their appeal. Fighting change is a Sisyphean task.
Nonetheless, there is hope that you can attenuate change by increasing the time over which it happens. This discovery is nothing novel. According to the UCSD Student Research and Information Web site, the amount of time it takes the average student to graduate oscillated between 4.4 and 4.5 years from 1999 to 2004. The data for the 2005 graduation isn’t complete, of course, because of slackers like me, who are fifth-years. We’re taking our sweet time to graduate; get used to it.
The fact that students on average take more than four years to graduate is likely correlated with the national trend of students completing double majors. The New York Times’ Tamar Lewin noted in 2002 that an increasing number of students were opting for double, triple and even quadruple majors. Lewin cited students’ desires to have an edge on the faltering economy and combat dim job prospects as possible explanations for the trend. Considering ever-increasing tuition costs, reductions in support services such as O.A.S.I.S., and the increasing probability of double or even triple majors, fifth years are not a surprising phenomenon.
It’s hard to keep up a great GPA with all the extracurricular activities required for professional school, especially if you’re also working. Students are encouraged to pursue their dreams, but not everyone gets to be president when they grow up. If you’re trying to appease the Bank of Mom and Dad, a double major may be a good compromise: I think of it as your dreams plus a safety net. Unfortunately, if you’re trying to do a biology and theater major at Revelle, that could conceivably take more than four years.
As a demographic, college students didn’t land in college because they did the bare minimum. They made it because they kept up good grades in the right classes while doing sports, student council and community service. We could have skipped out on the college preparatory classes, but we figured out that it’d be best to squeeze in as many AP and honors classes as possible. Working retail all our lives just didn’t seem so appealing. Is it so wild to speculate that we’d keep up in college?
Whether or not multiple majors are actually more marketable remains to be seen. Perhaps remaining in ERC as an engineer wasn’t the brightest idea of our college career. Maybe we should have switched majors when we failed chemistry the first time. But regardless, we’re still here. We’re going to keep experimenting with ways to deal with environmental stressors. Meanwhile, please, stop trying to kick us out. We’re not leaving. And we might be supervising you very, very soon.
