I graduated from Fordham University this past Saturday in a virtual ceremony. It certainly felt strange. People have said that they feel sad (and have expected me to feel sad), but I don't really feel sad, exactly. It does feel strange, though. A little while ago, I talked about my sense of anticipation. Now I'd like to talk about how it all feels after the fact.
When I think now of my time at Fordham, I realize that I lived through a tremendous amount of intellectual, social, and emotional stimulation concentrated in that short period of time. I'm not the person I was before, and I suppose college is supposed to do that to you. I don't feel sad, then, that it's all over. It simply feels like all of that was a world and a lifetime away. Now, I don't mean to downplay the real suffering that the COVID-19 pandemic has caused a lot of people. But I would say that the phenomenon of it (having the whole world sort of melt away, so to speak), feels like a fitting signal of the end of my college career. One minute I was locked in a routine; the next minute that routine was relaxed; and now, with classes over, final grades out, and Commencement finished, the routine is out the window.
I'll be needing to find a job (virtual, or maybe, if possible, in-person) for this summer, and then (I suppose) I'll begin (initially online) graduate school this fall. The whole world does feel uncertain at the moment. (At least, I feel that way, and I've heard a lot of people talk that way.) It feels like swimming in an immense ocean of time. The normal sense of chronology is gone. To me, it's all like an extension of what it feels like in the first place to have graduated college: liberation, in a sense, into a world at once infinitely more uncertain and infinitely more exciting.
