Tales of a Senior: The Future Is Now

You hear the same marketing crap all the time: you’re in college to better your future.

Of course, having a Bachelors doesn’t really do anything anymore. I’ve heard about a ton about people who have their Bachelors and are working at a Domino’s or something. Getting a Masters seems like the next logical step, for students and apparently their parents. So is it such a bad thing that I really don’t want to go?

Being around a ton of people who are all talking about getting recommendations and narrowing down their grad school list makes me realize more and more that grad school really isn’t for me. My mom’s look of horror when I told her this one day this summer is the only thing I see when I talk about wanting to go into vet tech after I get out of school. Issue is, as an English major, I’m mildly suffering with what-do-I-do- with-this-diploma? syndrome. Publishing and editing are options, sure, but I don’t want to deal with that crap. It seems that some people assume that because a field has something to do with your major, you will inevitably want to be a part of that field.

And of course, there’s that inevitable money issue breathing down the necks of graduates. Do you stay in school for another two years so you don’t have to pay off loans just yet? Everyone seems to sort of just assume that jobs are lining up to grab college grads, but with the economy the way it is, I’m thinking that this is somehow far from the case. More and more of my senior class seems to be regretting their major because there’s nothing they can do with it to get money. What ever happened to going to college to just learn?

I’ve never been too good at thinking about my future, anyway. Most people need to schedule, but I just work on the fly, and that’s not the easiest thing to do when everyone is shoving grids and boxes with terrifying numbers like “2010” on them (weren’t the 90’s just like a year or two ago?) in your face. Though I should probably start looking into vet tech stuff now – so, if anything, I feel less out of place when people say, “So what are you going to do after you graduate?” – work wise, I’m not really gonna look into that until after I graduate.

Future aside, it kind of surprises me that I only have about five full weeks of class left. Didn’t the semester just f**king start? Why haven’t I gotten drunk yet? How have I slept through three of my morning classes so far? Why does that one freshman keep flirting with me when I’m pretty sure he’s still jailbait? I’m not sure how well I can handle the fact that most of the freshmen were born in 1990 or later. That was only about ten years ago, right? …right?

Damn, am I ever out of touch with time.