Holy fuck, I really do not want to do this. I don’t want to take my senior year online, I don’t want to sit on Zoom calls for hours every day, I don’t want to be away from all of my friends, I don’t want to do an online only Senior Design project (fingers crossed for the spring), I don’t want to cancel the print edition of The Stute, I don’t want to be panicking about November 3, I don’t want to apply for jobs in the middle of the worst economic crisis in a century, I don’t want to have to move all the way across the country to a whole new place if I do get a job like that, I don’t…..I could really do this all day, so I’ll just stop here. Hi, I’m Andrew Kinney, and I’m a tad anxious about the upcoming year.
Hold on, I’ve been here before, what changed? Let’s turn back the clock four years. September 2016.
Holy fuck, I am so pumped. I’m finally a senior, I’m one last year away from finally escaping this place. Only one more year of praying, and dress codes, and mandatory masses. Only one more year of Connecticut, hopefully, honestly any decent college outside of this boring state will do just fine. Only one more year of living at home in that stupid house. Hillary is pretty meh, but at least that idiot Trump obviously won’t win. I’m starting to actually do real things in my classes. I finally get all the perks of being a senior, the best parking spaces, the fancy vests, the best lunch tables, everything. Just one more year until I get to live my own life, I really couldn’t be more excited.
Wow, I really did not anticipate how much remembering what senior year of high school Andrew felt like would make senior year of college Andrew feel like a jaded old grandpa. That Kinney was so full of energy, he hated large parts of his life, and he was more than ready to leave it all behind — he had been for years. Not only was he not afraid of the fresh start headed his way, he actively hungered for it. Why is it so different now?
Plain and familiar exhaustion is the first reason. Three years of Stevens classes, club involvements, social life, side jobs and internships, roommate drama, attempts at relationships, the random nonsense this school tends to drop in your lap on a daily basis, and all of the other crazy things that have made the past four years an absolute rollercoaster have been tiring. Incredible, transformative, educational, and generally growth-encouraging, sure, but also just plain tiring. As exciting as senior year of college naturally is, it also takes a ton of work which I’m still trying to build up the motivation to take on. 2016 Andrew saw the road ahead of him and immediately wanted to dive right in; 2020 Andrew took a quick peek, and he liked a lot of what he saw, but he could also really use some more sleep first.
The Andrew of August 25, 2017, put a group picture of him and his friends on Instagram with a caption full of song lyrics, “every time you go somewhere you leave somewhere behind (San Cristobal by Mal Blum),” but he hadn’t really given a damn about what he left behind that same May (the summer before Stevens I was couch surfing in Brooklyn, whole separate story). He hated high school, hated Connecticut, wasn’t terribly enthused about his home situation, and generally just wanted to get out. But as reluctant as he might be to admit it, Stevens has really grown on 2020 Andrew. Unlike high school, he has a lot of really good friends that he knows he’s going to miss, he has enjoyed the vast majority of his classes and has learned a lot, he’s gotten heavily involved on campus at virtually every opportunity and feels like an important part of things, he actually likes his apartment and Hoboken itself, he wants to believe that the school has helped him grow, and in general thinking about leaving Stevens is at most a bittersweet feeling, and at the least genuinely makes him sad.
Last up is the uncertainty of it all. 2016 ARK thought he knew what college would be like, or at the very least had the mentality of “anything will be better than this,” and so he was ready to set sail. 2020’s Long Legs could end up at a whole slew of companies that would all be radically different from one another, all in states that share the same disparity. He has to deal with fresh starts at school, too, since everything is online. He’s worried about four more years of Trump and what it could mean for his future and his country if he gets elected, now far more invested in politics than he was in high school. He likes his life now, or at least he did before it all got forced online, and he’s skeptical that the next phase will be as good as the one that’s ending.
Ok, I think that’s enough third person for one column. I’m worried about senior year because it’s all I have left at Stevens, and I’m not looking forward to leaving. All of my anxiety is also actively being amplified by the active job offer sitting in my email that I need to accept or deny by September 31, which would have me moving to Utah right out of undergrad if I accept. I’m sad that at least half of my last year will be spent at a computer desk. I’m sure that plenty of other people at Stevens, senior or not, feel similarly and that’s okay. Everything about this year is extremely bizarre, and it’s natural to be anxious about it no matter what your personal situation is. But of course, I’m going to need to find a way through it all, to muster the motivation I need and dig deep to conjure up some of that high school senior energy and enthusiasm. The thought that has so far successfully quelled even the worst of my anxieties is a pretty simple one: I started completely fresh here at Stevens, and eventually, I built a home I like so much that I’m now dreading having to leave. What’s stopping me from doing that again?
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