All Good Things...

I think it is finally starting to dawn on me that there isn’t much time left for me here at SJU. Next week is thanksgiving break already. After that we only have about three weeks of school—two weeks of class and one week of finals. Since thanksgiving is late this year, it’s going to be even harder coming back from break knowing that there is so much less time to spend on campus and with everyone here.

It might seem like I’m being a little overdramatic, but in reality how often am I going to be able to see the people on campus, participate in activities, and simply just be on campus? At most I can come up on the weekends. Sure, I can visit people then, but I’ll definitely miss not having everyone simply a phone-call or short walk away.

Missing out on all of the activities is what will probably be the hardest to take over the long run. I’m so used to playing volleyball three nights a week, having frisbee all the time, going to different philosophy presentations, and being in reading groups. None of this will be available to me anymore from home in Waltham. It’ll all be a solid two and a half hours away.

Back to the topic of friends and peers, at home I really don’t have anyone to hang out with outside of my family. Everyone I know is either still in St. Cloud, the Twin Cities, or else they’re somewhere even farther away. No one I know, besides myself, had made the decision to work or be in the Rochester area. Sure, I’ll love being able to actually hang out and be with my family all the time, but as much as I love them all, I know I’ll want contact with people my age group.

It’s definitely going to be a change, especially going from the college atmosphere to the “real world”. Friday of next week I’m going in to Kingland to discuss possible future employment. I’m hoping for a permanent position that pays well enough so that I can get my plethora of college bills taken care of. It would be wonderful to get my loans paid off as fast as I possibly can. It’ll also be hard to make the change from doing work on my own schedule, like I do here at college with my homework, to being on a regulated schedule. I did it for the last two summers, but that was only for three months at a time. The permanence of this type of lifestyle I don’t think fits very well with my personality, but do I really have a choice but that of conformity?

I keep thinking about the changes that I’ll have to make, but this time I can’t help but worry about them more because instead of knowing I only have to do it for a summer, I have to do it indefinitely. The end of an era approaches and I can easily tell you that I am not ready. In the last two years or so, I finally was able to fully embrace the college atmosphere and lifestyle. I wholeheartedly embraced it so much that I now do not want to move on. Transitioning has never been easy for me, and I am sure that this will be no exception.