It’s the final countdown. The end of the spring semester means different things for students at Carnegie Mellon. For some, it signifies the end of their first year here, and for others, it punctuates the end of their time studying here. It’s difficult to imagine our hearts in anything other than the work after the past two semesters, but there are less than two weeks left til the final day of class. Of course we still have finals, that’s something that is unlikely to escape our minds at this current moment in time, but it seems like for the first time in a long time, we can finally see the light at the end of the dark dark tunnel that is the academic year at Carnegie Mellon.
The thing that seems to be on the minds of the students most at this time is the progress of our academic track. Will we end up failing out of a class that is required for graduation? Will we manage to fit in that second or third minor? Maybe this is the time you are just now realizing that you have been in the wrong major for the past however many semesters you’ve been here! We are all in different places in the scope of our academic track, but we are all alike in the manner that we are undergoing a deeply personal and scary tumultuous journey. Unless, of course, you are one of the people who has it all figured out. In that case, congratulations!
It’s incredibly easy to find ourselves in the all too familiar traps of comparison. That pesky pesky unit counter in the corner of our SIO semester schedules seemingly taunts our capabilities and assigns a quantitative value to the work we take on. Sometimes anything less than a total overload can feel like taking the easy way out — even though we are an institution where success can manifest itself in so many different ways. Why associate a higher amount of units with a deeper sense of security in the work we put forth to our degrees? It’s not about the destination, sometimes it’s just about how terrible we can make the journey for ourselves so we can come out on the other side able to brag about our suffering.
In the grand scheme of things, the end of this semester is just another checkpoint — but it’s still very important for us to check in with ourselves and not just the pace at which we are progressing through this journey. It’s important that we ensure our sanity and emerge on the other side of Carnegie Mellon as functional adults, not just as degree holders. The light at the end of the tunnel gets brighter by the day, all we have to do now is hold on, and keep trucking forward.
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