It’s the end of the world as we know it: Do you feel fine? It’s OK to admit if you’re feeling the end-of-year jitters right about now. Who can blame you? Finals are here, and they are all that separate us from three glorious months of sun-filled freedom. Unless, God forbid, you’re graduating. If that’s the case, get ready for a heavy dose of reality.
Seniors, are you ready to trade in your hand-made beer pong championship T-shirt for the dress slacks and three-dollar tie your mom picked out at Value Village? I know you worked hard on that shirt, but there’s no turning back now.
For some, the transition from college to the real world is seamless. Take my sister, Natalie Glucklich, for example. She completed the School of Journalism and Communication’s Electronic Media sequence in the winter, and now she’s a reporter for NBC affiliate KOBI-5 in Medford, Ore. Hooray for achievement-oriented siblings!
And yet, being the younger brother of a journalist on the fast track gives you plenty to think about: Will I be successful like she is? Will I leave school as prepared for the real world as she did? Will I even make it out of here alive? Lucky for me, I still have two years to figure out the answers to these questions. For many of you reading this, there is no such luxury. Reality is staring you down like a rabid koala on the Australian plains. And, like rabies, this sobering fact can drive one mad if not properly equipped to deal with it.
No party lasts forever. We all know this. Some people, however, can’t handle the truth. Others have gone so far as to spend years postponing the inevitable. Those 25-year-olds who spend their weekends at undergraduate parties? They are the masters of denial. But who am I to criticize? No one falls into that role on purpose. It could easily be me in five years. Hopefully I’ll be a few inches taller by then.
You have to keep your eyes open to avoid falling victim to the pitfalls of the party lifestyle. The real world isn’t going to cut you any slack because you had too much to drink on Wednesday. Believe it or not, though, this is a good thing. There are people out there – people we don’t know – who are depending on us. We are the future doctors, lawyers, businessmen, journalists. We owe it to those who couldn’t make it this far to finish strong. Most of all, we owe it to ourselves. There’s not a day that goes by that I’m not thankful to be where I am. Beneath all this crap, this monotonous busy-work, is the opportunity to change the world.
The Irish writer and Nobel Prize winner George Bernard Shaw once said, “Some men see things as they are and say ‘why?’ I dream things that never were and say ‘why not?’” He probably said that to get chicks. But the point remains: When you see something you don’t agree with, you can either complain about it and go about your business, or you can make the change yourself.
So that’s pretty much the gist of it; another year has come and gone. And though time has hammered many of our lessons learned along the way into obscurity, the really important ones have a tendency to linger on. Often these lessons come not from a particular class, or from a favorite professor, but from the entirety of our college experience.
Some of us will leave here and go on to enjoy great success. Others will spend their lives sitting on barstools, pondering a lifetime of wasted opportunities. But the rigor with which we pursue our own happiness is what will define us in the end. And that’s really why we’re all here in the first place. The real world, like college, is filled with jubilant highs and sorrowful lows. If you don’t call your mom crying at least once, you probably aren’t working hard enough. But give yourself a put on the back anyway. Just don’t get too comfortable – reality is right around the corner.