Navigating the end of academia

Kofi Mframa, Opinions Editor

I know it won’t fully sink in until I no longer have my $5 Spotify and Hulu student bundle, or until my Amazon Prime subscription goes from $7 to whatever it normally is. I know I’ll finally feel the full gravity of what I’ve lost when my friends are no longer a five minute walk away, when every plan to reconnect meanders, falls and withers away through busy work schedules and the city-wide distance that will soon separate us. 

Then, I’ll know for sure that the four most pivotal years I’ve ever experienced have come to a close.

As I enter my last year in college, I find myself struggling to navigate the end of my academic career. My mind seems stuck in hindsight as I interrogate every decision I’ve made in the last four years, wondering what would’ve been had I taken the roads forgone.

Academia acted as a trellis shielding me from the weight of my many insecurities. Now that this chapter of my life is ending, it feels like a piece of my identity is ending along with it. I’ve tried to find ways to avoid this reality. I toyed with the idea of grad school, not because it’s something recommended for my field of study, but because it’s hard to fathom not being bound to a collection of letters. I can’t imagine how I’ll navigate my life without the structure and community that school provides. 

Nevertheless, this is reality I’ll soon face. As much as I am in my head, rewinding and reliving old moments from a time I’ll never get back, the only useful thing I can do is press forward. 

When I went to see “Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse” this June — really great movie, read my Letterboxd review here — I was struck by its theme of determinism, the philosophy that all events, including human action, are ultimately determined by causes external to the will. Miles Morales is the “original anomaly” because he is the only Spider-Man to be bitten by a spider from an alternate dimension — he was never meant to be a superhero, but he is. 

Instead of spending time wondering why this came to be, he takes the life presented before him, duties and all, and moves forward with his future in his hands. Even though I’m not a superhero, nor is going to school equivalent to swinging between Manhattan skyscrapers and traveling through dimensions to fight bad guys, his outlook is still applicable to my situation.

It serves me no good to worry about the things I cannot change. Time only moves forward and so should I. Instead of looking back at my time in school with sadness and regret, I should instead look back with gratitude for the many things I was able to experience.

I had similar anxieties when leaving high school, but when I opened the door to my dorm room on the 11th floor of Gladding Residence Center, I realized there’s so much life ahead of me that I have yet to experience. 

Although leaving college is a bit more final, there’s no telling where life will take me. It’s hard to find comfort in the ambiguity; I can’t say I’m fully ready for life past academia but I know I’m getting there. It will be different, harder even, but in that difference lies more life than I can dream of.