I have never been in Johnson, have not once stepped foot inside that particular dorm. Although I do generally avoid the hospital-fluorescent halls of the plex, I never consciously decided to stay away from Johnson. It just kind of worked out that way. If I’ve ever had friends who lived there, I never found an excuse to visit them, and if there were ever parties there, I never ended up going. It’s a fact of my college career that I neither thought nor cared about until this semester—my last semester.
As a senior terrifyingly about to graduate in just a few months, these realizations have begun to dawn on me with increased frequency. I’ve never been sledding in the Arbo. I’ve never taken an anthropology class. I’ve never swam in the Athletic Center pool, and I’ve never seen a basketball game, and I’ve never streaked across the green, and now that Fishbowl is over I don’t even have a College condoned excuse to do so.
It’s a weird and unexpected source of anxiety. While most concerns of college seniors are those of the future (Will I have a job after graduation? Will I stay in touch with my friends?) this concern is uniquely about the past. Have I had the “College Experience”? More specifically: Have I had the Connecticut College experience?
College, in part, is this strange place where you can get away with doing things that are crazy, moderately illegal and socially unacceptable in almost every other setting. These are the more generic bucket-list items that college seniors everywhere consider trying to check off before graduation. But then there are the items on the list that are more personal, and apply specifically to the place you’ve been living the last four years. Going to the Lyman Allen museum, climbing to the roof of Cro, engaging in substance-enhanced nature appreciation in our lovely Arboretum.
It’s become difficult to parse through this potential list—figure out the things I want to do before I graduate, the things I should do before I graduate and the things I don’t need to do before I graduate. I do not ever need to try the turkey bacon in Harris because it looks like greasy strips of cardboard, but I should probably go to a talk in the LGBTQ center because it might be interesting and expand my thinking in some way. Or maybe not, but at least I’ll have tried something that I won’t have a chance to do after leaving Conn.
Trying to catalogue everything you have and have not done throughout your college career eventually becomes exhausting. It’s a consuming project that would eventually require time and energy than it’s worth. It’s important to take advantage of this unique time and place in our lives, but no one should spend their last semester at college just trying to check items off a mental list.
So my advice to seniors is this: think about what you’ll regret never having done in college and try to do it, but don’t think about it too hard, and don’t let it get you down. Graduation is approaching, maybe too quickly for some and too slowly for others, but there’s still time to try new things, meet new people and have new experiences, even within our small campus. Live the last semester of your college lives with a slightly more open mind; take a more risks and have more fun. But don’t waste the present worrying about regrets you might have in the future.
