The Skyliner

Issue date: 4/12/06 Section: Opinion

I like watching people at the end of the semester. There is plenty to experience. For instance, there is a student in the publications office rushing from computer to computer, muttering under her breath and jamming a USB drive into sockets with the hope that her final class project hasn't been erased like she thought. Another student is furiously typing away, close to popping the keys off the keyboard, in order to finish his paper that is due within the hour.

Why is it that as college students, we have learned to wait until the very last possible minute to get things finished that we knew about from the beginning of the semester? I'm as guilty of it as the next person. I didn't research for a paper that night because there was a concert. I didn't finish a project because my roommates and I stayed up most of the night, watching movies and talking about life. College is supposed to be one of the best times of a person's life though, so isn't it okay to want the fun experiences over the education? Perhaps there shouldn't be consequences for not going to class because whatever other activity I have chosen to partake in will enrich my college experience just as much as a class would.

I think the reason I wait until the last minute to finish a project is because there is a little part of me that is scared. The more projects I finish, the closer I get to graduation, which means the closer I get to being pushed out into the real world and having to deal with real hardships.

Not to say that I haven't had to deal with hardships while I have been at college. Over the past few years, though, I have found that it has become harder and harder to remember the bad times. I can't always remember how stressed I was after staying up all night to write the paper that I can't seem to print out or how upset I was when Cartoon Network was taken off the school's cable network.
It brings me all back to these pictures in frames on my walls of my friends and I throughout the last three years that I have attended college. We are all smiling or making goofy faces. We look so happy. You don't see the biology test I failed or the family member that a friend lost halfway through the semester; you just see the smiling faces.

There is a line in the movie Just Married that has really stuck with me. A father is talking to his son about life, and he says, "You never see the hard days in a photo album, but those are the ones that get your from one happy snapshot to the next." As I looked over the pictures on my wall, I realized just how true that statement was.
Yes, college is supposed to be about the fun experiences that we have and about learning new things, but it is also important to remember the hard times because those are experiences that form us into the people we are going to be for the rest of our lives.

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