I was fully expecting and relishing the idea of entering senior year with overwhelming self-assurance and pomposity. I looked forward to terrorizing underclassmen with my polished Ivy-League parlance and sophisticated innovations in intellectual thought. Squeaking onto the Dean’s List for a couple of semesters and learning to wear my pearls and linen with the affected modesty and sincerity of the privileged, I was well on my way to being a self-righteous prick.
But, oh no, the lolling over my New Yorker and/or New York Times and basking in my newly acquired unflappable self-reliance was a fate of which I was sadly denied. Unfortunately, there seems to be this pattern in life where the hurdle you are about to summit looks so immense that it obscures the hundreds of other hurdles that lie beyond it. You are under the impression that if you just get over this one last hill, then you’ll be on easy street. I guess the mind plays that trick on you for self-preservation. If you knew the endlessness of hurdle jumping you might sit out the race, slouching on the bench, nursing a Gatorade. And where is the fun in that?
Okay, I have a foible: I attribute all my personal neuroses to the student body as a whole. But, I’m wondering if I’m the only senior soiling my undergarments (i.e. sh*%ting my pants) at the prospect of facing the real world. I think not.
And the weird thing is that I have faced the real world already. I worked for seven years before coming to school. Or, perhaps that is why I am soiling my undergarments: because I know how tough it can be out there.
In my opinion, Senioritis is a misnomer. Senioritis, the lack of motivation that seniors supposedly suffer from, affects freshmen, sophomores and juniors. However, it is not Senioritis that seniors are afflicted with. Instead, seniors come down with a heavy case of Seniorosis (or Seneurosis).
Seniorosis is a neurotic state of mind that students face in the final year of their undergraduate education when they realize that they will no longer be coddled in the Ivory Tower. Side effects may include: immense anxiety, heightened cigarette and alcohol consumption, sentimentality towards Cornell, clinginess to friends and avoidance of relationships for fear they will end once college does.
Seniorosis has a couple telltale signs. For one, you start to really love and appreciate Cornell. Secondly, Ithaca grows on you. Crazy talk! I know, but I actually like Ithaca now. I love the Bookery, the bars and restaurants in the Commons and even selling my clothes at Trader K’s when I get too fat for them. I love my routine of studying in Olin, running into friends and enemies, procrastinating over the Arts section of our free New York Times, drinking coffee and thinking of all the work I should be doing. I love going to the stacks and spending hours browsing among the titles of all the books I want to read and plucking up dusty hard-covers of obscure Elizabethan literature and thinking of how I could incorporate them into my honors thesis.
I don’t want to leave.
And yes, I am already anticipating my departure, even though I have a whole year left. But weird things hit you, like you’ll be looking at the course catalogue and you’ll come upon a class that you want to take that is next offered in the fall of 2008. And you think, ah shucks I’m gonna have to wait a whole year to take that class … and then you realize that you will never be able to take that class because you will have graduated.
Other signs of Seniorosis: freaking out about LSAT/MCAT/GMAT/GRE, realizing three quarters of your friends have graduated, wondering if you’ll ever be perceived as successful as when you first got accepted to Cornell, questioning once again whether you’re good enough, fearing that you will end up living on the street, in a cardboard box somewhere in Nebraska ... Or maybe it’s just me.
Claire Readhead is a senior in the College of Arts and Sciences. She can be contacted at clr39@cornell.edu [1]. Silk Blue Stockings will appear alternate Mondays.
Links:
[1] mailto:clr39@cornell.edu