There are very few things college students look forward to more than the ultimate goal of higher education: earning their hard-won degree and walking across the stage. But let’s talk about the level of difficulty that is the second semester of your senior year.
In the fall semester, there is still enough motivation running through the mental tank to complete your school work with your best effort, show up for every class, and engage with your extracurriculars.Partly because the race has just begun, and partly because, with the end of the calendar year, there are more brief breaks for holidays baked into the fall semester. But once the excitement of winter break fades, the spring semester brings a whole new level of pressure—especially for graduating seniors. Here’s why:
- The Hustle to Get Hired
Put simply, there are more pressing issues for graduating seniors, like securing a job offer after the launch into the adult world without the safety net college offers. For students who do not have job offers lined up, the spring semester is for the job search: applying for positions, interviewing, rewriting cover letters for the hundredth time, attending networking events in your field, and refreshing your inbox like it’s a part-time job. In the grander scheme of things, this can seem more important for seniors instead of that problem set your monotone Professor has due for you at the end of the week or the paper analyzing literary elements of Hamlet that’s due at 11:59 PM. The realities of post-collegiate planning can undoubtedly put a damper on schoolwork, when seniors are attempting to secure job security for themselves in a market that often demands experience they’re still trying to gain.
- Making Time for the People Who Made College Home
Everyone’s situation for what post-collegiate life looks like will be different, and that’s especially true when it comes to college friendships. One friend might be moving back home while job hunting, another could be heading across the country for a position they locked down last summer, and someone else might be off traveling through Asia before starting law school in the fall—everyone is on their own timeline, chasing their own version of what comes next. What this means, though, is that the way our friendships exist right now—all of us together, in the same space and stage of life—is coming to an end. Once we cross that stage, there won’t be any more late nights gossiping in each other’s dorms, no more chaotic group outings, no more last-minute library cram sessions with snacks and spiraling. So for a lot of graduating seniors, making time to soak in those final moments and build lasting memories with the friends who’ve become like family feels more important than ever. And let’s be honest—the endless lineup of senior events isn’t exactly helping us stay focused either!
- The Final Move Out
All out-of-state students understand the struggle! With the spring semester of your final year comes the reality that there are no more returns. The storage unit you’ve been paying for every summer suddenly becomes irrelevant. For out-of-state students especially, there’s a whole level of logistics involved—packing cubes, cardboard boxes, and impromptu donation piles—as you prepare to move your entire little world to wherever you’re headed next. Whether that’s back home, into a new apartment in another state, or some other carefully (or chaotically) planned next chapter, it’s a lot to juggle on top of everything else.
- Thesis Tunnel Vision
Whether you’ve been tasked with the monster that is a senior thesis, project, or capstone, the pressure to perfect your academic work all comes to a head during the spring semester of your final year. The second semester is filled with final check-ins with your thesis advisor, making sure every source is cited correctly, quadruple-checking for typos, and in some cases, preparing an oral presentation to share your semester- or year-long work with an academic audience. With all that on your plate, those assignments from other classes—the ones you registered for simply for the sake of meeting graduation credit requirements—start to slip further and further down the priority list.
The stress faced by graduating seniors during this time is insurmountable. The ever-present assignments and pressing deadlines, along with the real-world demands and responsibilities associated with the end of college and the transition into the world as a working professional, intensify this internal tug-of-war of what to prioritize. It’s important to acknowledge the realities of what your final year truly entails because it’s not the glitz and glam you may have envisioned when walking into higher education. So, for the underclassmen who wonder why seniors are wandering around campus like the walking dead, now you know!
Still, despite the pressure and chaos of this stage, there’s a certain beauty within the whirlwind. In the blur of applications, packing, and late-night thesis edits, we’re also closing one of the most transformative chapters of our lives thus far. These weeks leading up to that final moment of crossing the stage are full of retrospective snapshots of how far we’ve come since that first move-in freshman year. And even if, with everything on our plates, we don’t feel entirely ready for what comes next, we are prepared. In between the chaos and the goodbyes, there’s a quiet confidence growing—we’ve made it this far, and that means we can take on whatever comes next.