Petitioning to graduate is a lot easier than I imagined. Yes, I have to visit three different departments, which takes a little coordination. But the meetings take about 10 minutes, and involve me telling the advisor which classes I have yet to take and when I theoretically will take them. When I heard that by the end of my junior year I had to petition to graduate, I admittedly got anxious. What I had expected was a grilling half hour, fighting to make my classes count. Instead, small notes scrawled in the margins tell the registrar to not count my Civil War history class as an environmental policy class. Easy. As. That.
It seems as though I’ve gotten to that stage where college feels like it was too quick to get through. Granted, I have one more year (technically two more quarters with my journalism residency), and perhaps when I get to where my roommates are now — the last official week of classes — I will feel differently. But it doesn’t feel as torturous as it should have. Sure, I’ve lost sleep, lost exercise and lost touch with old friends, maybe irreparably, but graduating college (or being one year away from graduating college, as the case may be) had always been something far in the future. It’s not so far anymore, so instinctively I look backwards.
When I was in elementary school, I could only see my future self as a middle schooler. I could imagine what it would be like in the brave new world of being a teenager and changing classes. But I could never think further than that. So my morbid fifth-grade self rationalized that that meant I wouldn’t make it past the eighth grade. I was determined that my limited clairvoyance signified an untimely end.
Regardless, as I held my breath and graduated eighth grade, it soon became clear that the end wasn’t the answer. I would probably make it far beyond middle school, maybe even beyond high school. Obviously, I have moved on from that point, and getting toward the end is strange.
I have watched as friends graduated and moved away since freshman year. It’s clearly something that comes with being a college student. But knowing people for short periods of time made it a little less real. Now the friends and roommates I met the first day on campus are moving on and moving up. Now this feels more real, and it makes me realize that I will, indeed, make it to that point very soon.
Getting here was easy and petitioning to graduate may be done with the greatest of ease. But with my limited knowledge of the future, I have a feeling that the next stage — or at least transitioning and saying goodbye — isn’t going to be so easy.
So now, facing my last summer of my college career, I still can’t see the future. I’ve filled up my time in student groups and classes and the accessory homework and haven’t had time to dwell on it as much as I did when I thought it meant death. The surprise has worked out all right so far.