Dear Hannah and Jack,
I'm a second-semester senior. What is it like to have hope?
Sincerely,
Bummed in Bromfield
Dear Bummed,
It's freakin' awesome! We don't have to worry about anything. As but second-semester freshmen, we are still infatuated with our college experience and can't even imagine a day when we'll have to find a real job, get a real apartment and entertain ourselves on weekends without going to a fraternity party. We know vaguely that the real world is lurking out in the murky future, but we haven't been able to find it. If you see it, let us know. We'll be chillin' with the fishes in DTD's basement.
What's that you say? This feeling of aloof-ish euphoria doesn't last? Yeah, we've heard that. But being a pair of freshly-minted 19-year-olds (This is Hannah telling you to wish Jack a happy belated birthday!) (Thank you Hannah for the birthday wishes - Jack) (Anytime, buddy - Hannah), we've still got some time before we start getting all the "welcome to the real world" and that stuff. Actually, they told us that before we graduated from high school, and we believed them; unfortunately, we then proceeded to discover that college is even further from the real world than high school was. Oh well.
On hope, it's pretty nice. Our graduation date, way out in the year 2015, is just a number on a calendar. We can always speculate that the economy will improve, gas prices will go down, stock markets will go up and politics will be functional again by then. Hope is assuming that we'll all find jobs and stay in touch with all of our friends and be famous and walk on the moon. But we know a few seniors ourselves, and after some careful research we've found that being about to graduate is absolutely no reason to give up hope. You're probably a part-time student; you can go to The Burren four nights a week; and you might even have a car and plans for future employment. The packs of freshmen roaming campus envy your lifestyle. If you're still feeling depressed and don't really care what the freshmen think anyway, well that's your loss. Senior pub nights are a myth to us. Many of us don't even know what we want to study (except for the engineers - our lives are miserable anyway so you don't want our opinion), and we're just generally bad at stuff. So go ahead, lord your seniority over us, we don't mind. It will just give us bigger shoes to fill in three years.
We can understand, though, that the trials and tribulations of actual adulthood must weigh heavily on our seniors. However, this is probably the last time in your lives that you can act like we do (often stupidly), but also have real responsibilities like internships and the ability to feed and clothe yourselves without failing miserably. So enjoy this while it lasts! That's our advice - take it or leave it. Actually, you might want to leave it.
Anyway, hoping is the easy part. You just need to dig deep and find that long-forgotten naivete you buried somewhere circa October sophomore year. Remember that? Yeah - that was when the world was opening up before you and it was up to you to decide what to do with it. So don't be depressed! In just a couple months you'll have a new copy of Dr. Seuss's "Oh, the Places You'll Go!" to add to your ever-growing collection. So, if all else fails, at least you'll have some quality kindling.
