There’s a lot to unpack here and not a lot of time
The last four years have all built up to this. The feeling of finally being done with the most important academic career of your life, at least in my opinion. Your undergraduate years are the years where you hopefully get to find yourself and make lifelong friends, find a career you like and set up the rest of your life. Well, it’s the last part that really freaks me out.
There’s so much pressure placed on what you can accomplish in your college career: how many clubs you can be in, how many social ladders you can climb and how good your GPA is. By the time you get to senior year, you basically have it figured out and then it hits you that none of it really matters. I mean like, yeah, there’s a lot that looks good on a resume and creating a social network is useful when navigating a new career world, but was it worth all of the stress you put yourself through?
Needless to say, there’s a big change coming when you graduate. The normalcy you feel now and that you’ve felt for the past three and a half years is quickly disappearing. Your friends are moving away, you may even be moving away. There’s a lot of questions left unanswered, too. Some people are going to grad school, some are working, some don’t have a clue what’s going to happen. Post-graduation seems to be a time of incredible change.
The biggest struggle is whether you take a chance that you’re going to have a job and sign another lease (without the help of financial aid for those that are lucky) or move back home and revert back to your high school self. The biggest source of anxiety comes from committing to uncertainty. Is this what adulthood is like?
At a certain point, I realize I’m going to have to take a step into the unknown, but what exactly would I be getting myself into? That’s the scary part. It seems like that’s the scary part for everyone and the reason why many of us seniors haven’t even begun looking for apartments for next year. Frankly, we have no idea what’s going to happen when our leases expire because the only thing that’s guaranteed is our last summer in Madison.
I think in moments of such great transformation, it’s important to look for things that bring you stability. I keep clinging on to my schoolwork and any moments I can get to be with my friends because there’s nothing that’s guaranteed.