5 Stages of Senior Year Realization
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So... It's senior year. Yay? I'm an adult. Yay? I have to figure out what I'm doing with my life? Yay? No... not yay. Not yay at all. So, now what? No, seriously, that's THE question, but what happens if you're not one of those people who knows the answer?

1. Denial

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Well, the average student takes about 4.5 years to graduate, Maybe I WON'T be done in may. It may not be looked well upon in some people's opinions, but that could buy some time. Wait... No.... You CAN finish by May. *Insert random expletive curse word here, because you're not even sure which of those is the best one*

2. Anger

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Whose idea was this anyway? Making us decide what we want to do for the rest of our lives right now? And sometimes life doesn't even work that way? And have you even SEEN this economy? It makes it fairly hard to talk to adultier adults who lived in a different time when all this was upon them. Especially there's this new mindset of not wanting to get stuck in a job you hate just because it pays incredibly well and in demand. That's reasonable, right? Right?

3. Bargaining

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Okay, so obviously you're not going to have your dream job out of college. That's 99.999999% of the time the case.... Yes, you want to write books, but you also want to eat and stuff like that. There should be other options out there. Graduate school? Not a PhD, maybe just a Masters? Do people like that for your major if you're not teaching? How good does it look on a resume? Would it be worth being a composition TA for a semester?

4. Depression

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Still, if anything can go wrong, it will. What if you can't find a job at all? What if you're stuck in your hometown forever with a menial job? What if you're stuck doing something you hate for a living just because you have to fall into whatever norm, or worse, your plans for independence go awry? What's going to happen at the moment you realize you hate your life?

5. Anxiety

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Sorry, I can't in the right mind label Stage 5 as acceptance without feeling an ounce of optimism or calmness.... The "what-ifs" of the above stage keep haunting you, and you just hope to god, or whoever, that you think of what to do, because graduation and full adulthood is inevitable.

Now what? Now what, indeed....

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