For as long as we’ve been students, Spring Break has been the halfway mark of second semester. You head into that blissful week of vacation with snowstorms on your heels and come back, hopefully dragging the sunshine from some tropical getaway with you, ready to eat lunch outside, wear sunglasses to class, and embrace the endless loop of the Mr. Softee truck jingle. Now I don’t know about you, but in my opinion, the return from Spring Break has felt very different this time around. Obviously I want to spend every second sitting on the steps and I’m beyond excited that Bacchanal is right around the corner, but this whole “Senior Spring” phenomenon got very real in the wake of our last school vacation…ever. No joke, I got off my flight back to school to seven different emails about picking up caps and gowns, scheduling senior portraits, purchasing Senior Week event tickets, and sorority goodbye events. Shit got real, as they say. Slowly, you might be finding that all of this “last hurrah” craziness provides a déjà vu moment to the end of your high school career. You don’t really want to do anything, like, ever, but at the same time you want to go to every event and party and hug every high school student nervously touring campus with their anxious parents in tow. Getting out of bed in the morning is just such a struggle, but the end of your library career and the emergence of a world where evenings and textbooks don’t go hand-in-hand are just around the corner. As a friend who graduated last year so aptly put it: “All of the feelings, all of the time.” It’s upon us, fellow senior collegiettes: spring has sprung, and senioritis has struck. If these thoughts and feelings sound all too familiar, you’ve definitely joined the senioritis bandwagon. Read on for the five most common symptoms:
1. Everyone is SO young.
In a bar, in a big lecture class, at a campus event, wherever—everyone around you may as well be 12 years old. The guys are suddenly all your younger sibling’s age, no one knows how to PDF a class (please.), and the odds of getting a Hewitt single are causing raging panic in the line at Liz’s Place. Wistfulness quickly turns to horror upon the realization that speaking to a single boy in the room would officially achieve cougar status and that you and your friends are the only ones drinking legally. If anything could make you want to graduate, this is it.
2. I’m definitely going to be unemployed and homeless for the rest of time.
My 620 single is the nicest real estate I will ever lay eyes on in this city and everything is downhill and leading me straight to living in a cave in Central Park from this point forward. One minute you’re confident, collected, and ready to read all of NACElink on your quest for the perfect job for which you will be paid lots of money while doing something you love in the company of funny, kind, and attractive co-workers and hopefully your future spouse, too. Thirty-two seconds later, you are having a panic attack in the middle of the library because there are -4 jobs open in anything you’re remotely qualified for and everything seems to pay less than your current babysitting gig.
3. I have an overwhelming desire to do nothing but watch Netflix in my bed.
Getting out of bed to put on real clothes or go learn something just seems so daunting, and you seem to have developed an averse physical reaction to any and all attempts to actually do work. Cannot. Focus. To. Save. Life. It’s not that you’re somewhat depressed or are wishing time away because that would be just as upsetting as the thought of sitting through yet another discussion section. No, it’s more that you now understand how Lewis and Clark must have felt upon reaching the west coast. You came. You saw. You conquered. And now you just really, really want to lie on the floor drinking wine and watching Girls.
4. Being in class is actually infuriating.
Haven’t we learned enough by now?! And who makes a second semester senior write weekly blog posts or journal entries? Sadistic people, that is who. No, I do not need to write four drafts of the same paper and go over the definition of a topic sentence; I already turned in my senior thesis and my academic perfectionism seems to have disappeared into the English department mailboxes with it. Each second the professor lectures past the official end time of class is a little dagger to your soul. It’s terrifying to try to imagine how you’ll be feeling by the time finals week rolls around…to the gods of PDF-ing and seminars without exams, thank you.
5. I’m supposed to ______…oh well. You only ‘Senior Spring’ once!
There might even have been an occasion when you uttered the phrase “YOLO” out loud. Yikes. Bar hopping for a Monday night birthday? Obviously. Skipping class because it’s just too nice on the steps to actually stand up and move? Might have happened a time or two. Foregoing Sunday library sessions in favor of trying a cute new brunch place downtown? Of course.
Though it’s really important that you actually make it to the step of earning that hard-fought diploma, there’s truly something to be said for throwing yourself into the crazy, overwhelming, emotional rollercoaster that is senior spring. At the end of the day this is such a finite experience, so go to everything, splurge on Senior Week tickets, and soak up every second of the next seven weeks. The senioritis struggle is real and slogging through schoolwork can be painful at this point, but take a break from Netflix long enough to enjoy some senior spring sunshine. We’re in the home stretch, so we may as well embrace the end of this collegiette chapter!