If you came into college with a lot of AP/IB credits or worked your butt off overloading your semesters with a bunch of classes, there is a chance that you have the option to graduate from college early! This sounds like a great thing, right? Every students goal? Not necessarily.
Graduating college is something that every college student plans on doing. But finding out that this deadline is coming a whole semester or year early can cause a lot of stress that was not previously anticipated.
Friends
Most college students graduate in four years, after completing eight semesters of college. This means that in those four years, most students have made a ton of friends and expect to graduate in the spring of their eighth semester with all those same friends! Graduating early changes all of that. You are no longer graduating “with your class” with whom you began college. Having to make your own graduation party plans without your friends can be a pretty sad realization, especially when you dreamed about how it was all going to go down.
Graduation Season
You might be graduating in the fall or winter instead of the spring! If it’s cold outside, you can kiss those cute graduation pics wearing short dresses and heels bye-bye and substitute them for winter boots and snow angels. This may seem like a small detail, but graduating early may mean celebrating an important milestone completely differently than you expected.
Questions
“So what are you going to do after you graduate?”
This question becomes even more daunting than it was before. You may have the answer to this question already, but even if you do, you feel more pressure to deliver a solid answer since you are graduating earlier than your peers. Graduating early does not necessarily mean you have your post-grad life planned already, though. It might still be a mystery, and that is okay! But it still does not help when you are forced to answer this question that you are bound to receive every time you mention your early graduation.
Still…
All in all, it is a very exciting thing to be finishing college early. Graduation is still the final summation of all the hard work you put into school, and it should be celebrated with the same amount of vigor whether it be in the fall or spring – even if it will be indoors instead of on the football field. Everyone is on their own path in life and it is not the end of the world if you do things differently. Whether you take a semester off to apply to jobs or enroll in a post-graduate program (or go straight into the workforce!), it is merely the beginning of your life’s newest adventure!
Cover photo by Audrey Ampomah, all other photos by Eleanor Ritzman