Countdown to College: Waiting to Go

By Marisa

Lately, it feels as if I’m in a Samuel Beckett play. With four weeks to go until I graduate from high school and hardly anything worthwhile to do, I find myself stuck in a waiting game. My school days are drawn-out and boring as anything; the highlights of my days are the art house films we’re watching in French and the various incarnations of dodgeball my gym teacher keeps thinking up. I keep looking at the calendar each day, and although my parents tell me the weeks will fly by quickly, graduation could not be farther away in my mind. And not to mention freshman move-in day, which seems like light years away.

I have, however, found a few things to keep me occupied until graduation. It’s not much, but at least it’s preventing me from losing my mind from anxious waiting:

Making a list, checking it twice. Ever since I woke up in the middle of the night last week thinking of floor lamps, I’ve begun (albeit prematurely) keeping a list of things I’ll need for my dorm room this fall. I can’t sit down and write up a comprehensive list to save my life, so whenever inspiration hits – in the car, in the shower, at 3 a.m. – I’ll have a pen and paper handy to write down whatever necessity I randomly think of. It’s one fun way of making the time between now and September seem slightly shorter.

Course registration, part two. I began picking out courses that interest me quite some time ago, but in the coming weeks, I’ll have to finalize my schedule for the fall semester. I’ve started doing more “in-depth research” into the courses I want to take through ratemyprofessor.com and talking with current students about their experiences with certain professors. Both are great resources for information on whose classes to take and which professors to avoid at all costs.

Overdoses of TV shows. This has nothing to do with college, but it has become a favorite pastime of mine in recent days. Last Sunday, I watched all twelve hours of a twelve-hour House marathon, and since then, I haven’t been able to stop watching it. My goal is to catch up to the current season by the end of June, and then follow up with the other shows I’ve stopped watching regularly for whatever reason. Mad Men, Grey’s Anatomy, The Office…the list is endless. But my time also seems to be endless, so perhaps my proposed multi-hour marathons are truly meant to be.

Good old-fashioned procrastination. It’s not exactly college-related either, but nothing beats spending five hours on studying what should only take an hour thanks to Facebook and e-mail breaks every five minutes. I’ve really taken to those quizzes that keep popping up in my newsfeed, ranging from “What revolutionary figure are you?” to “What drug are you?” (Gloria Steinem and marijuana, respectively). I wasn’t much of a procrastinator during high school, so this is a whole new type of fun for me. I just hope these habits don’t carry over into the fall…