By Emily Osgood
After three years of difficult classes, stressful roommate relations, and a series of never ending papers, I’m finally a senior. In a year, I’ll be released from the safety of campus and thrust out into the real world. I always knew this day would come, but I never stopped to think about what I would do when it did. Of course, options abound: there’s graduate school, the Peace Corps, volunteer missions and…gulp…work. Sadly, most new grads have to move back in with their parents after graduation while searching for work and paying off those crippling student loans.

Everything in our lives has been scripted up to this point. We grow up and graduate from high school with good grades so we can go to college, but no one tells us what to do after that. Spending a lifetime of following the rules, it’s now time for me to make my own. You would think this would be exciting, even freeing, but I’ve never been so scared in my life. In the whirl of taking the GREs, filling out applications, and hearing all the things that are wrong with my resume, I’ve been having the same vision. I’m freshly graduated, at home in my parents’ house, wearing a bathrobe, a pint of ice cream in hand, staring at my two degrees mounted on the wall. Two pieces of paper behind a wall of glass encased by a wooden frame. They were supposed to open the world to me, but they are just as thin as my chances of landing a job right away. Am I sorry I went to college? Of course not; if I hadn’t, I would have had to face this problem four years sooner.

Graduating from college is the scariest thing I’ve ever had to look forward to in my life. I’ve come to the conclusion that I’m well-armed to face what lies beyond my college walls, and I just have to trust that 21 years have prepared me to tackle the task head-on. Like a true student, I’m viewing the abrupt jolt of reality that’s heading my way as just another test I have to pass. The only difference this time is that I won’t be rewarded with a good grade, but a successful life. Fingers crossed!