One Week Left: What’s Next?

Graduation is less than a week away. Between final exams, final projects, and asking Sami Apartments to give me a move-out extension, I haven’t really had the time to think about “what’s next?”

The question itself is daunting. Like many people, I don’t have a job secured and will be moving back into my mom’s place. The simple, two word question elicits fear and this sense of instability. I don’t know what happens next, and as I’m attempting to go through one of the most difficult transitional phases in my life, that two word question sits at the forefront of my mind. 

In the fall semester of my senior year I decided it would be best to just move back home, I wouldn’t have to pay rent and probably had a high chance of finding a job there and here in Normal. I told myself I would start looking for jobs in January and would begin to apply after spring break. 

4 days ago, I submitted my first job application to a publishing company in Naperville. My plan to get ahead did not exactly go as I had wished. These next few days feel like I’m tying bows on different parts of my life. 

All of these events I’ve either been planning or attending have the word “last” or “senior”  in front of it and I didn’t really realize how much it would all actually hit me. 

Last broadcast banquet, last formal, senior sorority pictures, senior WZND pictures and wall-signing, senior tributes, last book club meeting, last Her Campus meeting, last shift at NPL, last sorority banquet, last Sunday night chapter, and graduation luncheon. 

Everything has been leading up to that moment when my name is read at commencement. I’m excited to cross that stage, but I’m deeply saddened at the idea that all of my college memories are now behind me and will be referred to in conversation as, “oh when I was in college…”

Those bows aren’t untying, they’re perpetually glued in place. I can’t go back, I can only go forward. So that question comes back, what’s next? 

Truth is, I don’t know. No one really knows how to answer it and I think that’s what scares us. The idea that no one, not even the people in our lives can give us a straight answer. Some will tell us that finding a job and working is what’s next, others will tell us it’s the time to really just figure out what you want, work and still have fun. The really honest ones will tell us, you don’t have to have all of the answers right now. They’ll tell us it’s okay to not know what’s next. 

I’m choosing to listen to those people in my life. The ones whose answers are rooted in experience, the ones who probably felt the way we feel right now. The ones who dreaded the question and know what fear it causes. The ones who didn’t quite get the answers they craved. 

As I go into this last week of my college career, I’m going to live through every moment, not just exist in them. It sounds cheesy because it is. Soak in the last few moments with friends and worry about that job application after. Everyone told you years ago that college will be gone in the blink of an eye and as you’re sitting across from your friends at a bar or working on your final assignment, you can’t help but think about how everyone had been right all along. 

College really did just slip away without me even realizing it. And although I’m excited, terrified and anxious, I’m grateful to have the privilege to even think about what I get to do after I get my college degree. I think that’s how we should all think of this next chapter. 

How lucky are we to be able to plan a future, to think about one and live in one?

• #senior year
• college
• graduation
• post-grad