Senior year is supposed to be the time of your life. I mean, it was in high school. In high school you are like the top dog, you’re excited to finally be done with high school and be moving on to bigger, better things. But college is much different, and being a senior means a lot more. In high school, you can’t wait to party it up in college and meet new people. But we never think of what’s going to happen in four years.
Having just wrapped up my junior year, I can honestly say that being a senior in college is scary stuff. People expect so much from you—we need to know how to pay bills and be professional, we need to know how to make ourselves food and go grocery shopping and most importantly we need to know how to adult. But a lot of this we can’t learn in any class. Aside from having to learn all those lovely adult skills, we come into college and every person we come across is new. We make so many new friends, and in four short years, they are gone. Maybe not forever, but you definitely won’t see them every year like you're used to.
We come to college assuming that we will learn all that we need to know so that we may be able to go into the world prepared for life. But we go into the working world nowadays hoping and praying that we don’t screw anything up. It’s so hard to realize that although I might be an incoming senior, I won’t be completely prepared for my everyday life once I graduate. How do I know this? Because all my friends who have graduated before me. We look at them and see how unprepared they are, knowing that nothing is truly going to change prior to us graduating.
Yes, some of us don’t have to completely worry about being an adult as soon as we graduate because we will move on to graduate school. However, you still don’t learn that sort of stuff in grad school either.
Whether you agree with it or not, one main fact stays true—we come to college and make all of these friends. Which, don’t get me wrong, is wonderful. I love my friends, and I wouldn’t change meeting them for the world. But what happens when we graduate? Everyone goes home, generally they live in different states, so they are hours away from you. You were once used to seeing them every day and now maybe you get together on special occasions if that. The friends you meet in college will be your best friends for life. I don’t know about you, but I think it’s kind of a shitty feeling knowing that I won’t get to see them as often and that we are all going to continue on with our lives and move away from each other. Yes, life goes on and people have things to do and jobs and such, but you don’t get to just spur of the moment go to the mall with them or go out to eat together. It becomes much harder to see them and soon you have to schedule people into your day so that you can see them.
Don’t get me wrong, I am happy to move on to the next stage of life to be almost done with undergraduate and to be moving onto my grad school. I’m excited for the celebrations during my senior year and the time I have with my friends before life gets in the way, but it makes me sad to know that in one year I won’t be walking distance from them all and that I can’t just go to their room and talk to them about my day.
College will always be a huge chapter in our lives, and I hope that we will never forget the amazing memories that we made.
