posted
I think that last night it finally hit me. I have only four weeks of school left. I've been going through the motions of finalizing everything but it didn't really seem real yet. This is by far the easiest quarter I've had since freshman year. Its almost a freebie--I could have graduated at the end of the winter quarter. I've also never been lazier in my entire academic career. I'm taking two 100 level classes, both of which are full of 3rd quarter freshman or first quarter sophomores. I haven't even bought the book or taken notes in the one, but I’m doing fine in it just the same. I've got a math class where I blew the curve on the first test, by 20 points. And a stupid graduate class on analog circuits, where we started from Ohm's law for crying out loud. I've discovered too late how much I enjoy history.
I've been having trouble motivating myself to go into the lab and work on my research to the point that I haven't been in to the lab or spoken to my advisor for nearly three weeks. I actually find this rather distressing. Last year, I worked in two labs for 8-16 hours each every week, while taking 17-19 credits of chemistry and math. Last summer I spent ten weeks doing work that ended up on a poster at the ACS national meeting. I'm going to Cornell in the fall for graduate school. As of right now, I couldn't be less interested in doing any chemistry at all.
In short, I've got a horrible case of senioritis.
On Friday night I went out to eat with one of my roommates and the priest from the campus Newman Center. We went to a nearby pub, which sold ostrich burgers and breaded alligator bites, and was incidentally massively overpriced. After my roommate left, Father and I stayed for a while and he related a story about his first experience with senioritis. Father is a thesis away from a PhD in education and is perhaps one of the few people I know who has truly achieved perpetual student status (whether that is good or bad, I don't really know. I think though in his case its not really either.)
On his way to the last meeting of his last class in late May several years ago he was stopped at a red-light. It was a beautiful day and when the light turned green, he found it physically difficult to push the pedal and go on to class. He said that there was almost nothing he wouldn't have rather done than go on to class. The physical manifestation of senioritis was shocking to his. His story really hit a chord with me. It seemed to sum up what I've been feeling about school in a way that I haven't been able to do even to myself.
Suddenly everything that I've worked on for the last four years doesn't seem very important anymore. Hell, it seems like just yesterday that I was moving in the dorm and wondering if this was really where I wanted to be and what I wanted to be doing. Four years later, I still don't have good answers to these questions, but they've become irrelevant, because 1) its what I'm doing right now, and 2) I enjoy it for the most part.
I didn't have any of these issues with high school graduation. It didn't feel like it had much meaning to me. I knew it was going to happen for years in advance; the school had numerous class assignments about what one planned after graduation. It was much ado about nothing.
I'm rather jealous of all of the classmates that started to Drexel with me. They have another year still. I would have thought that I would be used to this by now, since I'm the only one that departs school each summer, but apparently I was wrong about that.
posted
I know how you feel. I graduate in the winter. The cruel real world will not listen to my pleas to stop existing.
Posts: 2258 | Registered: Aug 2003
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It's funny that you mention your Newman Center. The Newman Center associated with the local university here is called the St. Paul Newman Center. Which, of course, produces perpetual jokes such as, " When, exactly, did they make Paul Newman a saint?" Posts: 2454 | Registered: Jan 2003
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Good luck Hollow. I can't give any advice, because I don't have any to give, but I hope you can find what you're looking for in life.
Posts: 3420 | Registered: Jun 2002
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