Graduating in 2020

2020 has been a crazy year regardless of where you are in life or what you were doing when everything started going downhill. Some people had to cancel weddings, skip funerals, and live solitarily for months. For me, I will be graduating, and it has looked a whole lot differently than I ever imagined. When I thought about graduation before, I always thought I would be on campus and having the time of my life with my friends for one last go-around. I would get to go to all of the football games one last time and get as many free shirts I could from all the other events. Now, I am an hour away from campus, living at home with my parents, not going to any events, staring at my teachers through the computer, and can only have five people at my graduation. 

Overall, I am excited because I am graduating. Regardless of the circumstances, I am closer to being done with this education. I have enjoyed all my time in college, but I have loaded each quarter so much that by the end, it is entirely too much. The last couple of weeks always seem to go by in a blur, but they somehow get done. I am excited to not have to experience that pain anymore. I am also ready to have time. Time always seemed like a luxury unobtainable for me (even during quarantine). I am ready for that time in between graduation and getting a job where there is nothing to anticipate and no one to answer to. I plan on safely traveling to somewhere and sleeping for possibly a whole week. I am going to read a lot of books, watch a lot of tv, and be a whole lot of worthless. For the time that I am not in school or having a job, I will be an uneducated recluse. So I am excited. It cannot come quickly enough. The Pandemic and crazy 2020 cannot really change my positive feelings about graduating!

Even though I am excited, I am really nervous, uncertain, and disappointed about it. There was a brief time when this last quarter started when I was considering continuing and going to grad school. I thought about it because I know the future is so uncertain as of now and I didn’t know how I could get a job or make any next step after graduation. I eventually decided that I didn’t want to spend more money on something that I didn’t really need or want, so I canceled that idea. Now, I am still here with no certainty about what I am going to do. I mean, I know that I want to work with books and publishing. Getting one of those jobs is going to be rough, considering I live far away from cities that have those opportunities, and we are still in the middle of a pandemic. That leaves me no closer to having something planned for after graduation and that makes me pretty nervous and stressed. 

I am disappointed that this is how my college career will end, but hey, how many people can say they lived through and graduated during a global pandemic? This year is definitely going to be a long chapter in a history book someday soon. Maybe when I’m old and in a nursing home and students will come and talk to me about some of my experiences, and I can be part of a cool project? I am trying to see the overall best in this situation because there is easily so much to be upset about, and I want to be happy about something. College is supposed to be the best years of your life (so they say), and mine, along with many others, has been chaotic and questionable at best. 

 

• college graduation
• life after college