Your senior year of college comes out of nowhere and hits you like a brick wall. It's a time of great uncertainty and excitement. The thought of getting out into the real world is exciting because you'll no longer have to pull all-nighters writing that research paper that's due at 8 am tomorrow. Yet while you may feel this excitement, you also may want to sit in a corner and dramatically cry because you'll finally have to be a real adult and that's f*cking scary.
With your entrance into your last year of college, there is a sense that you'll need to have everything figured out. Friends, family, professors and even random strangers will ask you millions of questions about your future leaving you panicking and feeling like you need to know those answers. They'll ask you questions including: Where do you want to live? What field do you want to enter into? Do you want to go to graduate school? Do you think you'll be able to pay off your student loans? A lot of the time people ask because they genuinely care and want to know. But to the nervous senior, such as myself, this feels like the universe intervening and reminding one to start planning.
Sometimes the most stressful part of senior year isn't even planning for your future; it's the year itself. Senior year is filled with many "lasts" and a lot of "firsts." There's a feeling and expectation that you need to squeeze in everything you haven't done into these last nine months.
Haven't gone to that restaurant everyone loves? Gotta go immediately. All your friends are now 21? Time for Vegas. Want to see all the hidden gems near your school? Better carve out time to do so.
This is not to say that having a Senior Year Bucket List of sorts is a bad thing. It's just important to realize that a pressure exists to get it all done before graduation,which can sometimes be overwhelming. It's okay to take a step back and say no to a spontaneous trip or a night out. We all need to have nights reserved for binge-watching our favorite Netflix shows when we have that rare free time. We need to take time for ourselves, especially because on top of all this social fun, we have to finish our academic careers.
The thought of actually stepping across the graduation stage in May is still a crazy concept because to get there I still have a lot to do. Finishing the requirements for my minor, finishing graduate school applications, working at my current internship and writing my senior comprehensive thesis. All of these tasks are fine on their own but require a lot of mental energy and patience to complete them when put together. We have to constantly remind ourselves to take one step at a time and that we WILL graduate and we WILL finish it all. And if there are a couple things that take a little extra time to finish, that's okay. It's not a race to the finish line, so let's not try to make it one.
Senior year is going to fly by. We'll be walking across the commencement stage decked out in our caps and gowns before you know it. So let's slow down and enjoy it.
