Final Year Blues
Ever felt like eating your cake and having it too? That's life as a final year student.
Stepping into my last semester, I feel a wave of emotions. The most pronounced one is probably confusion. I want to graduate and escape this endless stream of exams and presentations but I also want to loiter around in the campus discovering more street food and taking candid shots of my friends as they laugh, sing or spill cola. I want all of these to end but I also want to hold on as long as I can.
Final year is a difficult phase to be in. There's a lot to look forward to. Probably you are going to get a job, apply for grad school, get married or even catch Pokémon all day, who knows. Turning back, it's also hard to recognise yourself. You used to be in shape back in the days, no? And you thought you would be a young entrepreneur at 21. Look how you got played but give yourself some credit. You no longer have panic attacks when presenting in front of the class, can finish that Economics book within a day and combine a handful of sources to pull off an "original" piece of work.
Four years may go by in a flash but it is enough to make bonds for a lifetime. Or is it? I wonder once we graduate, and not meet each other almost every day, will we still have so much to talk about? What about inside jokes that tickle us every now and then? Will memes floating on the internet still be so relatable? Can we tag each other and share a moment? And what about all those Facebook groups where we talked little about assignments and called each other names and turned so mean? Will hiding behind the classroom door with a massive cake and waiting on your friend ever be so fun again?
Every time I bump into a senior, I ask him how life is like once you leave university. Almost always they mourn having no semester break. Also, no afternoon naps. Meetings don't get cancelled as often as classes and hangouts with friends become a luxury because some have grocery to do, some have Skype meetings on weekends and some have flown off to distant lands.
The one last thing I usually ask them is, "Do you want to go back?" And most of them don't want to. Perhaps it's one thing to remember the bittersweet memories with an overwhelming sense of nostalgia and entirely another thing to go back and live it once more. So, it's safe to say every stage of life poses a different challenge and somehow we prepare ourselves for it when the time comes.
Now that the final bell has rung, we are all worried about the kind of jobs we will get into and absolutely dreading the future nine-to-nine lifestyle. Besides making futile attempts to push our GPAs up by a fraction, we are squeezing in more and more trips and hangouts between classes because one must manufacture enough happy memories to last a lifetime. Final year, amidst all the blues, has traces of cheery orange too, it seems.
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