I've learned from conversations with other seniors that many of us have had a similar experience: the infuriating conversation with a well-meaning adult who, in the course of making small talk, reduces our majors to their economic exchange values and inquires into our (potentially as yet nonexistent) plans for next year. Some adults also warn us against our chosen fields or professions, usually based on their own personal gripes with medicine, law, business or academe. Which begs the question — don't these adults remember what it's like to be 21 or 22 years old?
The end of college marks a real sea change. At university, our choices — what we study, where we travel and where we work during the summer — serve mainly to broaden our horizons, to increase the range of our possibilities. After graduation, decisions much more obviously exclude other possibilities, creating infinite paths not taken. It's natural that we resist attempts by adults to push us in a direction dictated by their regrets and that our response at the brink of such a narrowing of opportunities is to pause.
Senior year is indeed characterized by waiting, an imposed passivity before we can actively pursue the next phases of our lives. Waiting — for class to end, for the weekend to arrive, for the results of jobs and fellowship applications, acceptances and more often rejections, for theses to be finished and submitted, for graduation — is compounded by more fundamental questions. Who am I? Does what I do define me? What do I want to be when I grow up? Do I actually have to grow up? Knowing that these questions may not be answerable for years is perhaps the most frustrating of all.
The distinguishing characteristic of senior year is that though we wait now, movement and change are mere months away — whether we want them or not. At the beginning of the 19th century, German intellectuals Friedrich Schlegel, August Wilhelm Schlegel and Novalis drew distinctions between existence as "being" and as "becoming." They praised the second, with its inherent emphasis upon a process of continuous development. Rather than writing philosophical treatises, they composed not-quite-complete poetical fragments that the reader was left to assemble and interpret. The ideal model of "becoming" was a porcupine, its quills stretching out from the center, reaching always toward something just out of reach.
The constant striving of becoming correlates perfectly with the nature of education. Learning is a never-ending process, extending in myriad directions like a porcupine's quills. In June, this phase of our formal education, with its emphasis on soaking in the aura of great minds and engrossing ourselves in books, will draw to a close. We will then embark on the "rest of our lives," where we'll acquire wisdom mainly as the product of our experiences — be these at work, in relationships or as the result of haphazard coincidence.
Senior year, with its waiting, is all about being, an anomaly that some find very comfortable. We've finally learned the layout of campus, learned where all our books are in Firestone, learned to call our department faculty by first name. Precisely this level of comfort suggests that there remains little more for us to learn here. If we hope to keep acquiring wisdom, we must move on. Graduation just provides a ceremonial dressing to this realization.
The development of self is an Enlightenment project of continuing progress and illumination. Life doesn't let us get that comfortable. Instead, life insists that we figure things out as we go along and throws us new challenges when we get too complacent. Life is all about becoming. The end of senior year demands that we move beyond complacency, that we stop waiting and meet change with open arms. In the process of education, graduation is only the segue to the next step. Emily Stolzenberg '07 is a German major from Morgantown, W. Va. She can be reached at estolzen@princeton.edu.
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