(Photo by Maylin Rowe)

Confessions of a Graduate

By Maylin Rowe

Senioritis is a real problem, but not for the reasons you might expect. I love school, and wasn’t expecting to be burnt out in my final semester. Until, that is, my final semester actually came around.

The problem with the last semester, and possibly the last year, is that you start to take on a more professional mindset; your skills become more honed, and you are ready to take on your career. You feel ready, anyway, but there you are still doing assignments that feel like the same assignments you’ve been doing since freshman year…School itself starts to feel redundant. You want to stop paying to work and you want to get paid to work. And that’s senior year: it’s a time of transitioning. It’s like the conclusion of an essay, important even if it repeats some information, because it repeats in order to remind you of all the work you’ve accomplished, and to see the culmination given the context of the preceding work.

Although it may seem like a redundant process, feeling burnt out is actually good. It means you’re ready to move on. However if you move on too early, you miss out on the opportunity of sticking it through until the end. This is a feeling that will carry through life; sometimes work will require drudgery, but that doesn’t mean you don’t do the work. Sometimes home life and families will have the same fight over and over, and that doesn’t mean not engaging in the discussions, but it means pushing through and finding the conclusion.

So while this time is for transitioning, it also necessitates a close. There is an end to this chapter, a conclusion to the essay. End it well. Maybe you feel done, and that professors are asking you to do the same thing you’ve done a million times. Do the assignment a million times better than you ever have before. You’re tired and ready to quit, but you’ve made it this far. You’ve reached the finish line, but now you have to cross it. And sure, ending this race just means the start of a new one, but end this one well.