When is graduation? Honestly, I’m not really sure. I could look it up, but I won’t. This is the first symptom.
Welcome to the Worst Case Scenario of senior year: senioritis, a degenerative condition in which motivation slowly dissipates, calendars become fictional and the concept of “being a student” dissolves before your very eyes.
Earlier in college, life was simple. You were a student. You went to class. You did assignments. You had opinions about syllabi and a work ethic that could reasonably be described as “existent.” Your courses were carefully chosen to fulfill degree requirements, and your extracurriculars were abundant enough to make LinkedIn proud. You were busy. You were striving, thriving and barely surviving.
Then there is the promised land of after. After graduation, you become a “graduate.” For some, this means employment. For others, this means aggressively refreshing job boards. For a brave few, it means continuing their education—but in classrooms that suspiciously do not track attendance or ask you to memorize polyatomic ions. Regardless, graduates exist in society. They have roles. Their email signatures actually hold meaning.
Senioritis exists in the far more dangerous space between these two identities. At this point in your education, you are not yet a graduate: you have no diploma, job and no authority to say things like “in the real world.” However, you also are no longer a student–at least not spiritually. The registrar may disagree, but you know the truth. Classes become optional (in theory). Assignments develop a sort of negotiable quality. You find yourself enrolled in things like “Eurythmic Movement” and “Discovering You,” which sound less like academic requirements and more like icebreakers at a corporate retreat.
Extracurriculars? Those were surrendered last semester to the most enthusiastic underclassman you’ve ever met, who says things like “I’m just so excited to get involved” and still means it.
So, you exist in limbo: neither a student nor a graduate, drifting across campus with an alarming amount of free time and no clear purpose. So what is the solution to having no motivation left and a whole semester left to endure?
When assignments feel optional and class attendance is merely a suggestion, you may initially turn to illicit substances as a way to pass the time. After a few weeks lost in a less than productive haze, however, boredom inevitably sets in, and you find yourself searching for a new form of stimulation. At this point, it is time to turn your attention to Case Western Reserve University’s unanswered questions.
Who actually uses the telescope on top of A.W. Smith notoriously mentioned on campus tours? Why won’t the university invest in sufficient sidewalk salt, and how many times will students slip on the binary walkway this winter? And who, actually, are the students in campus promotional materials? I have never seen them in real life and am increasingly confident they were engineered exclusively for marketing purposes.
This, perhaps, is the final stage of senioritis: the urge to finally understand the institution in full, arriving just in time for you to leave it behind.
Worse case, you learn nothing and graduate anyway. Best case, graduation eventually arrives, allegedly, and you move on to adulthood, where senioritis is replaced by an even stranger condition: nostalgia for the place that caused it.