So what are you doing next year?

The first time I got the question in that particular form was the first day of OA — one of my freshmen asked me, and all I could do was say something vague while trying to sound reassured and excited. All I knew at that time was that next year wouldn't include curing cancer, making a million bucks or even something mundane but reliable, like graduate school.

I'm not writing this to protest the question. I've been getting it a lot, not least from my mother (though she's been less pushy than expected and does read my editorials — hi, Mom), and I've been asking it a fair amount myself in my less sensitive moments. It's not a bad question at all — it says "I care about you," "I might want to call you next year if the long distance isn't too expensive" and only sometimes, "did you make out better than I did?"

True, it puts up dividing lines between classmates, but let's face it — the lines are already there. I have a hard time being polite when I hear about investment banking jobs. The best response I can come up with is, "oh, interesting." But that's another editorial, one I don't expect to write because I'm not sure anyone who came here to land a $ (how-much-are-those-jobs-paying-a-year-now?),000 position is going to change his mind after six hundred words written by someone who will be going on to lesser employment than himself.

Let's put all that aside. I am dead excited about next year, and was even before I knew I wouldn't be unemployed, unhoused and unloved after graduation. As much as all the alumni supposedly love to come back here (and let's remember that reunion attendance rates are never near 100 percent), I think panic about post-graduation plans can easily be cured with a few reminders about the not-so-nice elements of Princeton.

It's crawling with people who have more money than God and know it, or know it but don't realize that this is an unusual luxury. It gives women eating disorders and exercise addictions. It makes people compulsively check their email five to 15 times a day, and it warps our minds enough to think that's ok because everyone's doing it. It induces strange behavior in men who start wearing pastel polo shirts and are physically unable to push their collars down. It sets 80 percent of upperclassmen back 15 years in common sense by making them think it's not laughable to pay six to ten thousand dollars a year in the name of mediocre, institutionalized, hard-to-get-to food (hey, I almost did it — no implied judgment). Personally, I'll be walking away from this place with an obsessive chocolate addiction, the memory of some skanky foot fungus and enormous relief that I'll finally be able to stop daily email without possible ramifications on my homework, thesis or fire inspection preparedness. I'll have good memories, a solid education and some favorite professors to look back on too, but those already get enough press around here. This editorial is a reminder that it's not so bad to be leaving Princeton, even if these are the best years of our lives.

The "real world" is not such a bad place (ok, in some parts it is, but those parts are mostly off limits to US citizens anyway), even if you are walking away from the best darned undergraduate institution in the country without a swanky job, or any job at all. There's time to do fun stuff – go to the park . . . go to the park with your dog . . . have a dog. You might even meet someone who doesn't go to an elite university or even live near a town with a Ralph Lauren on its main street. Imagine, mingling with the masses we've read so much about in our political theory courses! Imagine friends you don't have to schedule in with 17 back and forth emails, the possibility of not pulling three successive all-nighters twice a year before Dean's Date and a library that lets you check the children's books out of the building. It's all waiting, "beyond the gates." Aileen Nielsen is an anthropology major from Las Vegas, Nev. She can be reached at anielsen@princeton.edu.