The Campus Celebrity this week are the Seniors of IUP.
A Letter to the Seniors:
Three years ago this month you were excited to leave home to experience what you assumed would be the best four years of your life (or maybe you were nervous about leaving your family). Either way, life was changing for you because you were now leaving the familiarity and comfort of routine high school life for the unpredictable college life. Going in, you have high hopes of a fresh start–a chance to reinvent yourself and be whatever you want for the next four years. Suddenly, reality sets in and you realize it’s not all the fun and games that people may make it seem. Yes, you have more free time during the day, but that’s usually spent doing other things to enhance your learning or networking skills. In the beginning the will to hold on becomes thinner and thinner, but you hold on anyway praying for graduation to hurry up and arrive.
Now here it is–your last first day of school. If you’re like the rest of your classmates, you have never been more nervous in your life. While it’s great to know that you have persevered through it all, this is undoubtedly the most bittersweet year of your life. Now you realize that you only have one more year to make it count. After this year, you will have to put all of your education and social connections to the test. In a sense, college is the engagement, and graduation is the marriage to the rest of your life. In college you can focus on your interests, and you make a commitment to improve yourself and your craft. After graduation you have to honor that commitment and make something of yourself. Whatever you do post-graduation somehow depends on what you’ve done pre-graduation.
No longer will you have the summer to contemplate what will come for the school year, now you will be working non-stop, January to December. It’s what you expected, but now that it’s here you wish you could have just a little bit more time, right? Wrong! Life waits on no one, so instead of allowing the stress of post undergrad stress you out, bask in the time you have left and go out with a bang. This way you will have no regrets, what ifs, or “shoulda, coulda, woulda’s” when your time is up. Aim for the dean’s list, join a social or athletic club, meet as many people as possible, attend as many parties and functions as you can, experience everything there is to experience, and make your everlasting mark in your school community.
Hopefully, after you receive that diploma you will feel grateful and ready to take on the world, because you have already tackled college.
Wishing this senior class the very best of luck!
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Photo Source:
dumais.us