I can’t believe it’s here again. Freshmen, for you it may be all-too-recent history, but seniors, you’re probably experiencing some deja vu right about now.
Graduation day seems to be approaching faster than the “Grey’s Anatomy” season premiere, and we fourth-years have landed ourselves back in familiar territory: senior year.
Most of us went through it just four short years ago, and it has managed to creep up on us once again, along with those sometimes antsy, often wistful moments that come along with it.
A senior year is utterly unique. No longer do you have to focus on charting a course for yourself (academic or otherwise) or finding partners in crime to stick by you; it’s all about reveling in what you’ve discovered and conquered along the way.
It’s about enjoying the place you have reached and not letting the next three quarters pass by while you bemoan leaving it all behind.
When I informed my neighbor that I would be graduating in June, her immediate response was, “Oh, so you’ll be entering the real world in a few months!”
The real world. That expression always irks me. It suggests, of course, that I have been living in a fantasy land of easily accessible food and shelter.
But I say that, right now, this is our real world.
Before it’s time for each of us to take our Inverted Fountain plunge, we will have done a lot of growing up here amid an insane amount of culture, perspective and history.
For many of us, it is all we know and feel and breathe all year round. That ties us to this campus and to each other pretty tightly.
For some reason, though, it’s still extremely easy to get caught up in missing everything before it’s gone. Instead of enjoying every last second you get to spend with close pals, suddenly you’re feeling completely deflated and unable to think of anything other than that fateful day when your roommate will move out of the apartment.
It’s almost impossible to banish those thoughts entirely, but it seems like a waste of energy to linger on them.
We’ll have plenty of time in the future to wallow, so why start prematurely? Miss what’s gone when it’s gone; enjoy right now what you have right in front of you.
Now, I’m a self-declared list person. Basically, to-do lists guide my life.
During the process of writing this article, I considered including one of those UCLA “must-do” lists that would involve this seasoned Bruin clarifying exactly which activities are mandatory for those seeking a fulfilling and worthwhile college experience.
But not wanting to risk coming across as a pompous 21-year-old who just happens to have the definitive word on all things related to campus life, I nixed that idea.
This campus never ceases to surprise me, and I have no idea how I’d even begin to narrow down my list.
So make your own list. Get out there and decide what’s mandatory for you.
Oh, and I guess I have one more piece of advice: Throw caution to the wind during the time you have left. After all, my neighbor’s “real world” is closer than you think.
Baumann is a fourth-year psychobiology student.