Week 10. Finals Week. Move-out. Au revoir.
For Bruins, it’s the familiar closing act of another academic year: saying goodbye to a quarter packed with deadlines and stress, and welcoming three months of summer before the cycle begins again.
But what about the students for whom there is no next quarter? The ones who aren’t refreshing their enrollment appointments or planning next year’s schedule. The ones preparing to walk across the stage and turn their tassels, but don’t quite know what comes next. Grad school? Law school? Maybe a gap year?
What happens when being a student is all you’ve ever known?
Graduation hangs over me more with each passing week. No matter how much I try to focus on the present, it is always there in the distance, slowly drawing closer. It should be exciting, right? Four years of my life have all culminated to this moment. I’ve been molded by the knowledge and wisdom that my professors, mentors and every other role model I’ve had have shared with me, preparing me for things beyond undergraduate life.
However, whenever I think about graduation, I feel like I’m standing on opposite ends of myself. I’m a complete mixed bag of emotions. On one hand, I dread letting go of my dorm, my campus life and the hands of professors whose guidance carried me through some of the most formative years of my life. There’s a comfort in knowing exactly where I belong every day, in having a place where my purpose is simple: learn, grow, repeat.
On the other hand, I can’t pretend that I won’t feel relief when it’s over. Endless late-nighters, hundred-page reading assignments and the stress that somehow manifested itself in binge-eating that finally seem to have an end. For so long, college has felt infinite — each quarter leading to another, every deadline replaced by the next. Now, for the first time, I can actually see the finish line and I honestly want to sprint right to it.
Maybe that’s what makes graduation so difficult to process. I find myself mourning something that hasn’t even ended yet while simultaneously wishing parts of it away. I want more time, but I also want to move on. I want to hold on to the life I’ve built here, but I’m so exhausted from living it. The closer graduation gets, the harder it becomes to tell whether I am grieving, celebrating or doing some strange combination of both.
It’s even more difficult when the outside world seems especially cruel these days. Rising costs of living, a horrendous job market and the uncertainty of whether things will ever “get better” make me dig my nails into UCLA even harder. Graduating and saying goodbye is already heavy, but saying goodbye and stepping into uncertainty feels debilitating. Especially when it feels like you’ve spent four years doing everything you were told to do — working hard, getting involved, making connections — and you still don’t know if it’s enough. If you’re enough. I thought I’d done enough, but they keep moving the line.
Maybe this is me being too cynical and pessimistic. Maybe it’s just growing pains. But if graduation is proof of anything, it’s that I’ve made it through four years of uncertainty already. Maybe I can make it through a little more.
For now, I’m still trying to make sense of it all — what it means to leave, to begin again and to step into something that can’t yet be fully seen. I don’t have clarity as I approach graduation, and I’m not sure I’m meant to. If you’re another graduating senior feeling this same mix of fear, relief and uncertainty, then here’s to you too. Here’s to all of us learning how to hold on and let go at the same time.