Ah, senior year. Three years down, one to go.
Coming back to campus in the fall has always been exciting for me. Another year, another new set of possibilities. And of course, if something didn’t play out the way I wanted, there was always “next year”. This year, of course, is a little different. No longer is there a “next year”. At the beginning of this year, it finally dawned on me: our time here at Duke—as college students—is finite. When this year comes to a close, so will my undergraduate career.
This realization is enough to send any sane human being into a slight panic mode. You mean to tell me that next year, I have to be a fully functioning, independent working woman that supposedly has her life figured out? You’re kidding. Ever since I got to Duke, people have asked me the generic question, “What do you want to do after college?” My answer was always something along the lines of “I don’t know now, but I have plenty of time to figure that out.” A perfectly sufficient answer—until now.
Now that I will officially be an alum in just eight short months, it really would be helpful if I had a slightly more concrete answer to that question. Fortunately for us Dukies, we have a wealth of career resources available to us. Take the Fall Career Fair back on September 12th; hundreds of recruiters looking for the newest bright minds. Great in theory, but in all actuality quite terrifying. For every one recruiter at the Career Fair, there’s probably seven of your Duke peers decked out in business casual and just vying to schmooze the recruiters. And of course, this is all in preparation for NEXT year. Correct me if I’m wrong, but didn’t this year just begin? It’s exhausting to say the least.
And to make matters even more stressful, as a senior it feels as though you know nobody on campus. The university numbers have remained the same; there really aren’t any more people on campus compared to last year or the year before. And yet, it seems as though I can walk around campus for hours without seeing a familiar face. Furthermore, the faces I do see on campus all just look so young. You mean to tell me that the freshmen were born in 1994?! How I envy their youth and innocence.
The combination of the job search and the new crop of young Dukies, compounded by the average Duke workload, really is enough to make a senior’s head spin. Searching for a job and navigating the sea of underclassmen makes everyone feel so darn old! In fact, seniors joke so frequently about being “washed up” that it has practically become a term of endearment at this point.
When it boils down to it, senior year has a great deal of stressors. Unfortunately, these stressors are so salient that it becomes easy to get wrapped up in the negative aspects of our final year. As a result, we forget all the positive aspects that come along with seniority. And as much as I wish it wasn’t true, this is our last year at Duke, our last “hurrah”. Do we really want to remember it in a less-than-positive light? I doubt it.
Sure, next year you have to enter the “real world” of work and graduate school, but for now, you’re still an undergrad. Take the stress in stride, but also take full advantage of the cliché perks of college that don’t hold up too well in the real world. As Drake said (yes, Drake), “my excuse if that I’m young and I’m only getting older.” You know that class that you’ve been dying to take but haven’t because it is completely unrelated to your major? Sign up for it. That person that you kinda-sorta-know-but-have-never-been-introduced? Introduce yourself. Late night trip to Cook Out? Do it. Shooters again? Why not. Duke Bucket list? You better finish it. The point is, while it may feel like the end of your Duke undergraduate career is just around the corner, you still have a full fourth of your college career ahead of you. Make the most of it. Chances are you don’t want to look back on your final year of college—when you objectively are old—and feel like you left any rock unturned. Go get it.
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