On paper, senior year looks a bit like this:
Even though at times it can feel more like this:
And also includes a bit of this:
Almost a month in, I still haven’t fully wrapped my head around the fact that I’m a so called ~Big Man On Campus,~ especially because at five-foot-two I am physically neither big nor a man. I’m taking a full course load this semester in a variety of subject areas, from the Jazz History to Thermodynamics and even a class about Alfred Hitchcock.
I’m lab managing a group of freshmen in BME Modeling and Design, a class that it seems like I just took last semester. They ask me (???!!??!) questions about their calculations, lab reports, and BME Life,™️ even though it seems like I was just in their shoes complaining about physics II or trying to understand why my efficiency calculations were yielding a value over 100%. (Spoiler Alert: it was a math error; I’m no superhuman, no matter how much I wish I could be).
I’m also tutoring Molecules and Cells in the Learning Den, coordinating a design competition, and applying to jobs/grad school, all of which lead me to wonder, “Who trusts me to do this?”
My friends and I have this conversation a lot. It simultaneously seems like we just got here yesterday and also like we’ve been here forever. On the one hand, ranting about ~Networking,~ job searching, and various flavors of grad school entrance exams (LSAT//GRE//MCAT etc etc) over a lunch we all packed at home can make the days of Wolman and the FFC feel like lifetimes ago. But I see the panic spread across the faces of kids arguing about electric fields and titration curves and feel like I should be participating in the discussion, despite having taken those classes three years ago.
What exactly am I trying to get at here?
Honestly, I don’t really know. Being a senior is funky.
School is no longer my biggest stressor; I know my school work will all get done because three years of experience tells me it always will. Real Life™️ seems to be casting a darker shadow than my SBE III homework or upcoming Thermo midterm.
This year so far has been marked by a communal panic about what’s coming next, while simultaneously trying to live in the moment and make the most of the year we have left here.
Like I said, it’s just all pretty funky. Not bad; just weird.
