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Countdown To Commencement: The Beginning Of The End

countdown to commencement: the beginning of the end

Remember when you graduated high school and you thought life would be over? And then it got exponentially better when you got to college? Well, unfortunately, now that you’re graduating college, your life is actually over. But before it ends, you have a ton of important questions you need to ask yourself:

What am I going to do for money?
Where am I going to live?
Where are all my friends going?
How will I make friends in the real world?
How is it time to leave already?
Did I actually learn anything?
Is everyone crying as much as I am?

As the last days of class drag on and the weekends fly by, some of these questions will be answered, some of them will be left unanswered, and what’s worst, is there are even more questions that you didn’t even think to ask. We have alumni and family members to try to guide us, but you’ve made it this far, right? You have proven that living on pasta and potent potables is possible. You’ve gotten through every all-nighter and dragged your ass to class even on days when it wasn’t mandatory because you wanted to get the answers for the midterm. You have risen and fallen and risen again more times than Lindsay Lohan. College’s strange culture has been futile against your solid resilience, but you have a new challenge in the near future.

Seniors, we are in this together. There’s nothing we can do, besides failing stat for the third time, to stop it from happening. All of college, we’ve been told that it will be over before we know it, and that ended up being the goddamn understatement of the century. We must have been infinitely drunker than we thought that we were. Actually, we probably were anyway, but that’s besides the point. Between worrying about whether or not the guy down the hall was texting us back, freshman writing seminars that ended up being the easiest classes of all time, where the party was going to be that weekend, or when finals were, we didn’t realize that three and a half years passed.

We didn’t change, we just became more of ourselves. We finally grew into our big girl shoes and started making our own decisions. We focused our time on people and things that interested us, and left the rest behind. There were whole days that we spent in bed, presumably hungover, but those days were just as important as the days where we ventured into a new city with our new friends to make new discoveries. There was fun nights and failed nights, strong drinks and weak drinks, good guys and bad boys, but what has been labeled as the best four years of our lives are rapidly coming to a close. However, it’s not over until we go through all of the rites of passage that all college seniors go through. There is a lot of sadness that is about to cunt punt us into the next phase of life, but until then, it’s up to us to make each week count while the clock counts down. Our time starts now.

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Ali Hin

A born and raised Jersey girl, she can always be found covered in sand and pizza sauce. Her personal brand is "that girl." She prefers wine in bottles because she thinks outside of the box. Send fan mail to [email protected] or by smoke signal.

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