I am not graduating this year. This fact seems negligible; I am a junior, and approximately seventy-five percent of my fellow Columbia undergrads are in the same boat. But I'm finding the prospect of another year of enrollment particularly daunting. So daunting, in fact, that I've decided to spend half of the next school year on a continent to which thousands of lost souls and Nazi war criminals before me have fled: South America.
I entered Columbia College in the fall of 2004 with the class of 2008. After a freshman year defined by the little-fish-in-a-big-sea phenomenon and humiliation surrounding the fact that I'd nearly failed a class called Intro to Computers—to computers, not even computer science—I was traumatized. Halfway through the following summer, I came to the conclusion that I simply couldn't go back, and so I decided to take a sabbatical. I interned for a literary magazine, I lived in Brooklyn, I tried to find myself.
My friends were confused and somewhat perturbed by my sudden departure—particularly the gay male with whom I had conspired to trick Housing. By way of some simple room switches in a Ruggles suite, we had planned to pull one over on the hetero-normative bureaucrats in Hartley so that we could share a double. When I failed to materialize in the fall, Housing was quick to replace me—with a married SEAS female who was none too pleased about bunking with my guy friend.
A year later, I returned to Columbia, and quickly eased back into my freshman social circle. But my old classmates' acceptance has left me in a strange position. The vast majority of my friends and acquaintances are now seniors, so everybody's graduating—except me. Though many of them are quite partial to Columbia, and they are all a bit nervous about being spit into the work force, they've seemed to be collectively sighing in relief these past few months. We made it, their newly relaxed faces convey as they throw back frothy beers during Senior Night at Havana Central. Four years and look how far we've come.
I keep finding myself sharing in their high spirits—until I remember that I had to sneak into 40 Days and swallow my dignity by emailing the CC Senior Dinner organizers to ask if I might attend this year, instead of sitting by my lonesome next year. I feel like a kid who just found out she was adopted, grasping for identity, unsure of my place in the world and in future issues of Columbia College Today. Am I a junior, or a senior? To which class's fund do I donate that penny I've been saving?
And here we have arrived at my fix-all solution. As soon as the semester ends, before I can visit anyone's new six-people-in-two-bedrooms off-campus apartments or feign excitement at their boring entry level jobs, I am cutting out, headed down to where the sun shines a little brighter, to travel and then study abroad for the first semester of my senior year. Some might say I'm in denial; I like to think of myself as delightfully adventurous and dizzy with wanderlust.
So what that after Commencement I will have no friends on campus and more than 30 miserable credits to go? None of that is going to matter when I'm at the discotheque at three a.m. in Buenos Aires, drunk off copious amounts of red wine and red meat, tangoing with some guy named Ernesto. I'll just close my eyes and sway to the music, "remembering" how high I threw my cap into the blue, blue sky during Class Day, the proud look on Bollinger's face and all that money I got from my grandparents for earning an incredibly useful B.A. If that's not the real world, then I don't care to join it.
