As a senior, transitioning from a carefree San Diego summer back to the daily class grind was especially difficult.
Three years ago, I eagerly went to every Welcome Week event, found all the Stuart Collection art pieces, nosed around the spaceship library and checked out a concert at the Loft all within the first week.
This year, I deleted every welcome-back email I was sent (goodbye, Revelle Infolink), scrolled right past the “Meet the Beach” pictures littering my News Feed and didn’t even bother checking the contents of my backpack before heading off to my first class.
Yet, countless other seniors don’t feel as jaded as I do; instead, they feel a sense of panic. Looking at all the exuberant and bright-eyed freshmen, it’s easy to experience a twinge of jealousy. They have the next four years to make their mark here and do undergraduate life right — seniors have already served most of their time, through all their snoozed alarms and less-than-stellar midterm grades.
There’s the notion that you must fit in every learning experience by the end of your last year of college, because afterwards, it will somehow be too late. Many soon-to-be graduates feel the sudden urge to get the reckless party animal out of their systems: to dance on tabletops, get kicked out of clubs, kiss beautiful strangers, crash theme parties and embark on cross-country road trips — all in one weekend.
It’s not true, however, that the end of college means the conclusion of fun times. It won’t quite be the same Sun God revelry, but you can still have parties at 30.
When you join the working world, you won’t abruptly need to turn down the music before midnight, and (gasp!) head to bed at a reasonable hour. Starting your day before 8 a.m. may mean fewer Taco Tuesdays and Thirsty Thursdays, but you can simply compensate by amping up the weekend festivites.
You might also feel wildly unaccomplished next to your peers who have spent summers in the Amazon rainforest and are working to find a cure for Type II Diabetes, but that doesn’t mean that you have to win all the prizes during your last year here. We’re young and we have so much time.
Even if you didn’t study abroad like everyone and their mothers did this past summer, the Leaning Tower of Pisa will still be there for you to take a shameless selfie with in the coming decades.
Speaking of pictures, seniors: If you don’t have any photos of your time here, you need to change that. That’s something you can’t go back on — you’re going to want a record of how you looked in your 20s.
I possess terrible documentation of a monumental time. The only images I own from the past few years have been stolen from friends’ Facebook albums and, more often than not, are saturated with awful Instagram filters.
Another note to keep in mind: Please get your Undie Run needs fulfilled before graduating. The general public tends to frown upon that sort of behavior.
