The end.
Graduation.
The culmination of “the best years of your life.”
Screech. Squeak squeak. What’s that sound? I think it’s the world’s smallest record player playing “My Heart Breaks For You.”
Do you think college students should dread graduation? Get real.
After you graduate, you’ll never have to choke down gallons of bitter coffee at 2 a.m. to stay awake to cram for finals.
Your posture will improve because you won’t have to trek across campus wearing a backpack filled with 15 pounds of books.
You can stop memorizing Civil War battles, physics formulas and vocabulary definitions, because you will never have to take a test again.
You won’t have to be lab partners with the guy who saw you (fill-in-the-blank with your most embarrassing moment from freshman year). New people will surround you that have not yet seen you at your worst.
No annoying professors will lecture you again about the “real world.”
Celebrate! Uncork the champagne! Throw handfuls of confetti!
Obviously, we’ll miss friends, parties, so much disposable income, student discounts and our comfort zones. We’ll miss the luxury of sleeping in with no boss to reprimand us. We’ll miss having crowds of people our own age constantly surrounding us.
But we can’t stop graduation from disrupting life as we know it now. (Well, unless you blow all of your finals. For shame!) We’ll all have to face the inevitable day-graduation-at some point.
So why dwell on the past? Instead, we should jump for joy at the opportunities that the future holds.
We’ll finally have the college degree that we’ve been working so hard to obtain for the last four-or five, six or seven-years. Aren’t doors suddenly supposed to open for us?
We’ll finally get to pursue jobs in fields that really interest us. We’ll be able to showcase the talents that college has helped us to cultivate.
As college grads, we are in the prime of our lives. Or, to quote a favorite phrase of Muriel Spark’s Miss Jean Brodie, we’re the “crŠme de la crŠme.” Our college experiences have liberated us and filled us with potential to succeed.
We need to grasp the opportunities in front us: chances to find jobs, travel Europe, cultivate relationships or accomplish whatever we decide that we want to do.
Now let’s put the rose-colored glasses aside. I expect to experience difficulties adjusting to post-college life.
People generally dislike change, and graduating and leaving a comfort zone tends to throw us into an abyss of uncertainty. What do we do? How do we act? Suddenly, people expect us to become a “grown-up.” We have to find a “real” job and support ourselves.
We need to remember what Frank Sinatra sang: “The best is yet to come. You think you’ve flown before, but you ain’t left the ground.”
New experiences can shatter our current opinions. We may think that we will never go through a period in our lives as awesome as our college years, but what do we know?
We’ll never have a true understanding of “the best years of our life” until we have lived much longer. Change challenges us, and challenges make our determination stronger.
That means that moping about leaving behind “the best years of your life” when you graduate is not allowed.
When you make changes in your life, you start a new story. So graduation is really only the beginning.
Jenn Rousey is a senior English, French and communication major. She doesn’t care about your comments because she can no longer be reached at [email protected].