Senior Year Is Stressing Me Out

I'm gonna be bald by the time I graduate.

Ok, I know it’s only the middle of the semester – the hump of the term – but I can’t lie … senior year is brutally kicking my ass. As I keep referring to my day-minder to see what is due next or what I need to worry about in the near future (For example, the GRE), I can’t help but think back to sweeter, less busier times such as my first year in college – which I swear feels like it just happened yesterday.

Seniors, doesn’t it feel like just last week were filling out college applications, picking where we would attend, and nervously packing up our rooms and moving into our dorm room for the first time? The last three years have flown by, and this year is no different, except instead of saying to yourself “I have ___ many years left” you hear the fast-paced ticking of the clock letting you know your time is dwindling.

Tick. Tock. Tick. Tock.

Well, if you’re like me, you are hearing more than the ticking of the graduation clock.

Instead, you are hearing the voice of your professor asking you to revise your essay on Plato and Aristotle; all your friends talking about graduate, professional, and law school applications; the text from Kaplan prep-test books screaming at you off the page (it usually yells: YOU SHOULD HAVE STARTED STUDYING YEARS AGO); fellow majors asking you about your honors thesis and the advisor you are working with; your parents inquiring with “What’s next?” after graduation- and of course – in the midst of all this – you hear your own thoughts of: “Am I having a quarter-life crisis?” and “Why is it a Friday night and instead of dancing to Britney Spears across some dirty frat-basement floor am I reading about the importance of family in children’s literature?”

But perhaps, through all the insanity of senior year and its overflow of required responsibility, the most important voice you hear is the one in the back of your head asking after every turn of the page: Is it winter break yet?

Seriously, I’ve never needed it so badly in my life. And as much as it pains me to know it’s yet another sign that my college career is coming to an end, I really. need. an effing. break.