Senior funk: Two degrees too warm

Senior year feels like a room that's two degrees too warm or a note that's a third of a step flat. "Something just doesn't feel right." That's the phrase I've been hearing drop out of seniors' mouths since the second day of frosh week. There is something palpably different, a vague sense of everything being just a bit "off."

Few can explain what this weird, nebulous, yet undeniable "off-ness" is exactly, but even friends at other universities have agreed that there's something unsettling about the final year of college. Maybe it's the fact that it's not what we were expecting. When we reached senior year of high school, we felt like we were finally on top. The younger kids knew who we were, we were getting ready to go off and have awesome times and drink awesome shooters in college, we got cool gear that said "SENIOR" all over it and we pretty much ruled the school.

Most of us get to drink legally our senior year. New and exciting as that is, senior year of college comes with few perks. Everyone's in a suit all the time for a fair or interview, you have to figure out what your final classes at Princeton will be and the big T is looming like an impending visit from a Jewish grandmother. Then there's that whole thing about the rest of your life. The second you forget about that one, your parents or career services will be there to remind you. Senior year in high school was sweet since you knew where you were going, you weren't worried about doing that well in classes and you could slip comfortably into your senior slump. Senior year in college is pretty stressful, and the weeks fly by faster by than ever before. There's no time to "slump," so it seems we are instead plunged into a funk.

Your post-junior year summer, which you most likely spent doing something to ensure a job after college, feels like it was a little taste of the real world — the one that starts before 10 a.m. at least five days a week. It gives you a little taste of the cool, new independence and leaves you with questions like, why do I have to take these classes and do this reading that has nothing to do with what I know I want to do after graduation?

We probably all knew that getting ready to leave Princeton at the end of this year would be hard, but the beginning of the year is turning out to be just as much of a challenge. With various groups having auditions, eating clubs having Bicker and sororities and fraternities having rush, people who are friends for reasons other than those organizations are really having trouble trying to find the time to get together so feel further isolated and divided. Seniors who are involved in these organizations feel incredibly ambivalent — both envious of the underclassmen just starting this new, exciting thing and happy that it's their last time going through the exhausting process of getting new members.

A lot of people are ready for a bigger pool of people. Running into the same good, fun people also means you run into the people you might have awkward or unhappy memories about. Though we often feel like we keep seeing the same people, we still feel we don't know half the school. For example, Natalia Balko '07 felt certain this was the root of her discomfort with her senior status: "We're completely focused on other things and completely removed from underclassmen. We're completely out of touch, they're just a sea of faces that we feel we don't really have anything in common with. They've been here for a month, and that's so incomprehensible to us. We almost feel like outsiders on our own campus because we are doing so many senior things, that we are in some ways very separate. No one can understand the things we're doing now."

As ready as we feel for something new, the real bummer is that we all know we'll miss Princeton intensely when we're gone. These are the simple times when we're not a slave to the man and jaded by our hospital residencies or late Friday nights making books for clients and getting fat off late-night Chinese food orders to our cubicles. Despite all that, taking the advice of my elder brother and parents to make sure I savor this last year seems like trying to find meaning in a Pauly Shore movie. We're trying to do too much at once and trying to embrace the past three years while realizing that the Princeton opportunities are coming to a complete end in eight months. At the same time, we're also looking to the limitless future and trying to reconcile those past and future elements in a single moment — it's overwhelming. Laura Berner is a psychology major from Rye, N.Y. She can be reached at lberner@princeton.edu.