The Cornell Daily Sun (https://cornellsun.com/category/opinion/opinioncolumns/graduation-columns/)
I’ve been accumulating ideas for this final column since freshman year. Amorphous thoughts stored in the back of my mind, half-baked phrases in the notes app on my phone, 3 a.m. text message wisdom to friends. Yet now, when I have to transform my jumbled miscellanea into coherent sentences, nothing I can write feels adequate. After all, how do you consolidate four years, one pandemic, a million existential crises and a billion more memories into a cohesive narrative?
Some of us don’t know where we’ll be next year and even for those that do, whether it’s a job or graduate school, our everyday lives will probably be drastically different from what we’ve known for the last four years.
Even at graduation’s door, I am finding out more about what I could love further.
Not to go all opinion-writer-run-amok, but recently, I haven’t had the rosiest feelings for McGraw Tower. Its quarter-hour clanging feels obnoxious. I get it! Time is running out! No need for the constant reminder!
I type the final words of my senior column. I set a reminder on my phone, likely for the last time, to pick up a print copy of The Cornell Daily Sun tomorrow morning.
I never considered myself a great writer — when it comes to Hotel School cliches, I hit a lot of them. But I wanted to cover columns about Cornell, which I felt were lacking in the paper a few years ago.
We’re not only good learners but also good listeners and thinkers too. We learn from lectures and, even more, from the conversations that we have with each other.
had never known so much suffering that year — it was like I could not trust the world to be kind or safe, and I could not trust myself to feel safe and treat myself with kindness. I write this because I know that I am not alone in my suffering.
So, you tell yourself that graduation is not for a while –– that you have plenty of time left. “Senior year will feel like forever,” I remember thinking to myself back in August. Yet, here I am in May, in what feels like the blink of an eye, preparing to depart. College students are always given the cliched advice to “make the most” of their four years. But what does that mean? I certainly didn’t know.
I don’t recognize myself right now.
Not in a bad way, it’s just that this person who greets me at the mirror each morning is miles ahead of where I expected her to be, or should I say, where I expected myself to be.
Every semester, I’ve made a habit of checking in with myself with a single question: “Would your freshman year self recognize you?” I don’t know where the question stems from. I don’t know why I continue to ask it semester after semester. Yet, every semester I do, and I can say with certainty that the answer is a strong and resounding “no,” and I’m proud of that.
For reference, freshman year Catherine was someone to know, and some of you did. She was 17, younger than her peers and hyper-aware of it. She was scared of being away from home and alone for the first time in her life.
When I’m sixty four, I want to remember it all. Cornell has not been one story for me. It has not been one lesson for me. It has been a frenzied, beautiful time. It has been the greatest honor of my life so far. And it has been three and a half years that I do not believe I could ever possibly forget.
