Dear Old State,
Where do I even begin? Let’s start with a “thank you” — for everything.
Thinking back on the last four years in this middle-of-nowhere town, I never thought it would actually be time to leave. The walks around campus have turned into walks down memory lane – whether it’s the place I met my best friend or the place where I drunkenly walked into a fire hydrant and learned to never do that again.
Every spot has a memory and every memory has made me into who I am today, a soon-to-be college graduate from the greatest university in the world.
Trying to wrap my mind around leaving this place puts a hole in my heart that only Penn State can fill. Dropped off as a baby freshman, this place was huge, scary, and unknown. It look me a little time to get my bearings, but not knowing is everything here. That’s how you meet your soul mates and how you figure out that you must carry an umbrella at all times. It’s how you know you can never rely on buses to get you anywhere on time and that you will never find ice cream better than The Berkey Creamery. All these little things about this campus are what make it so perfect.
We enter this place at 18 and leave at 21… or 22… or 23… or 24 (if we’re lucky). This is the biggest change we’ll go through in our lives and we have the ability to do it here. You start running around Fratland with strangers who you met on your floor because you were introduced by your RA, then you’re bar hopping downtown with those same crazy people four years later, all while wondering how you made it through together and how the hell this is all about to end.
This day is simply always a myth in our minds – something that you know is coming, but you try not to come to terms with. The countdowns have begun and the bucket lists have started to be completed. Time is becoming limited and precious. It’s the beginning of the end. The end of one chapter and the start of a new one. A new one full of unknowns and mistakes you haven’t even made yet. Once again, you are being thrown into something, and you’ll soon realize you are not in State College anymore. Once we graduate, we become real people with real responsibilities that become much deeper than finishing your INART quiz just in time for Gaffeoke Wednesdays. Cheap Happy Hours don’t exist anymore and cranberry vodka’s become 3 times more expensive. Money will start to be saved instead of spent, and you will no longer drink 4 or 5 or 6 or 7 days of the week. Your friends will never be in the next room, or down the hall, or down the street. You actually have no idea where half your friends will even end up once you leave here, and you start to realize the reality of it all. Things will never be this way again. Ever.
The cap and gown has been purchased and the tears have started.
If I did not choose to go to Penn State, I would without a doubt not be the person I am today. These 4 years have taught me about life, myself, and relationships, more than anyone or anything could have. This campus has gone from me not knowing anyone to seeing familiar faces everywhere I go.
College isn’t forever — it’s 4 years long. And those years will be the best of your life. So to the Freshmen, the Sophomores, and the Juniors reading this, cherish it all. Cherish the days, cherish the nights, cherish the laughs, cherish the friends, cherish the fights, cherish the tears, cherish the break-ups, cherish the make-ups, and cherish the love — because life goes on, but your college years are with you forever.
I will forever bleed blue and white and forever watch this team on College Football Saturdays. Beaver Stadium will forever hold a place in my heart and I will forever follow a “We Are” with a “Penn State.” I will be forever proud to call myself a Nittany Lion and will forever remember every memory made in this Happy Valley.
When they say Penn State is a cult, they’re right — and I wouldn’t have it any other way.
Sincerely,
The Class of 2015