this is my last week of my undergraduate career. and to be perfectly honest, its a little anticlimactic. i feel like my whole life has been leading up to this point,but it feels just like any other finals week in any other year. yeah, after this i will be done with school (possibly) forever, but after this i will have nothing. i'll be jobless, school-less, living with my parents.
everyone i talk to asks me "what are your awesome grown-up plans!?" "how are you feeling?" "are you excited?!"
world, I DON'T KNOW.
first off, i kind of have plans, but not really.
second, i'm feeling sad. happy. excited. anxious. nervous. nostalgic. grateful. overwhelmed. annoyed. blessed. accomplished. preoccupied. intelligent. inadequate. normal. but today, mostly sad.
i'm not JUST excited. why should i be? i have been in school for my entire life as far back as i can remember. i happen to love learning and school and classes and tests (go ahead, judge me). i love the people i've met and gotten to know and grown to love because i have been at school. i love buying school supplies. i love sitting in a classroom with people you've never ever met and learning together. i love getting an assignment back and seeing your work with a big fat gratifying A on the top. i love walking around campus with a big fat backpack and waving and smiling at passers by. i love the stressed out nerdies that frequent the hbll. i love the awesome and unlimited opportunities that students have. i love getting discounts with my BYU id. i love making friends in the cougareat and random interactions with strangers.
being a student has been a major part of my identity, and now i feel like that is being taken away from me, but not being replaced with anything else (yet).
by graduating, i am leaving this all behind. and yeah, i will still have the friendships that i've gained, the knowledge and skills i've aquired, i'll still be able to make new friends and learn and whatever, but it simply will never ever be the same. even if i end up going back to school eventually, it won't even be the same.
anyway, that's how i'm feeling. but mostly when people ask if i'm excited i just say yes.
love,
rochelle
p.s. this is me, back in the day. HA... i guess not much has changed.
So. I just wanted to say that I completely 100% know exactly what you are talking about in this post. Because I felt the exact. same. way. And I almost felt a little guilty for not feeling all ramped up about graduating. But I was just like you in that I LOVED school and I loved being at BYU and I loved all the nerdiness of walking through the WILK or living in student apartments or going to a play at the de Jong. And even now I still miss it. For the next year while I was just working I felt depressed. But then I went to grad school to study law and it was awesome. In fact, it was even better than undergrad. It wasn't until I was finishing law school that I finally felt the excitement and the accomplishment that I had always thought I was supposed to feel when I was finishing undergrad. And graduating law school really was one of the best days of my life. I still miss school sometimes. Sometimes a lot. But anyway, this comment was not so much meant to be about me as to be an expression that I feel your pain and wish you luck in whatever you end up doing!
ReplyDeleteWe were also sad and excited and all those emotions when Jeff graduated. I firmly believe that it's not just school:it's BYU. There is no place like it on the whole earth. And we wish we were still there so we could go walk around campus on Sunday afternoons like we used to.
ReplyDeleteYou are so awesome. Something else is coming your way that will be just as fulfilling.
love you!