As the fall semester came to an end, I was feeling pretty good about my grades and classes overall. This semester, my second to last semester of my undergraduate career, was filled with some of my most exciting (and least exciting) classes I have ever taken. I wrote my senior thesis paper on the family structure of World War II in the United States and how the government expected their female citizens to be superheroes. This project consumed innumerable hours of work and much of my brain capacity. As exhausting and seemingly never ending as this class was, I could not have been happier with the outcome. My thesis reflected an issue close to my heart: telling the stories of women whose voices can be easily forgotten or overshadowed in history. When I wasn’t working on my thesis, I was concentrating on my graduate school application and was ultimately accepted into my first choice program. With a full course load, I tried my best to balance school work with having a social life and enjoying my senior year of college. This balance paid off greatly when I saw my term GPA and could reflect positively on my semester.
After seven semesters, I began to see the light at the end of the tunnel of undergrad. I have mixed feelings about this light. Next semester I will finally be in graduate school learning teaching skills and experiencing time in the classroom. I have waited for this experience for literally my entire life. However, I know I will long for the days where I complain about the dining hall food, or that the metro is running late, or that I’d have to be on-call that weekend. The little annoyances of college seem to fade into the background when I think about my life post graduation. This is a life that I have chosen and am looking forward to, but it will be so different from how my life is now. I won’t be living twenty feet away from my best friends, I won’t be living in the nation’s capital, and I will have different expectations as someone who is no longer in college. I’ll be a part of this “real world” that everyone keeps talking about. I’ll be saying to my brother and younger cousins how they shouldn’t take their college days for granted and how jealous I am of them; the exact same words that were said to me nearly four years ago.
Four years. How has it been for years? Four years through the trenches of undergrad, the classes that I never thought would end, the late night conversations that built the foundations of my closest friendships, the quizzes that were only worth 7% of the final grade that I thought would tank me if I failed them, and the life that I have built for myself will all come to an end on Sunday, May 12th 2024. It is because of these experiences that I can look back on my undergraduate years with nothing but fond memories. I will continue to cherish them as I move on to the next chapter of my life.