Whose Woods Are These? I Think I Know...

This past Sunday, May 20th, 2012 at approximately 11:30am, I graduated with honors from my undergraduate college.

To be quite honest, it's thrilling and horrifying to think that the words "I'm a graduate" apply to me - that my days at college are over. There have been an unbelievable number of "goodbyes" this week, and it still hasn't really sunk in that I'm really leaving, that this is really it. There's really no way for me to express how much I already miss the dear friends I've met here. This place truly has been my home for the past four years, and I am unbelievably sad to leave it.

I'm not quite sure how to sum up my college experience, or especially how to characterize my attitude towards the future. Because it's here, it's big, and it's scary. I have no idea what lies in the future for me. It's nerve-wracking not knowing what I'll be doing or where I'll be even in a month from now. In my college president's commencement speech, she talked about embracing both the wonder and the horror of reality. It's hard for me to walk off this cliff into the unknown when it seems that all I see are the horrors of reality: no job, no plan, no clear long-term trajectory. But then I realize what I have, how inconceivably fortunate I am, and suddenly joblessness turns into an opportunity to travel and explore, no plan turns into time to figure out what I want, and no trajectory turns into the ability to branch out. The president's closing words, from a poem entitled "Salute" by A.R. Ammons, come close to describing the future I'm looking forward to:

May happiness

pursue you,

catch you

often, and,

should it

lose you,

be waiting

ahead, making

a clearing

for you.

Congratulations class of 2012. You are going to do amazing things. I love you all.