Snow melts from the parking lots. The HU Senior Team sends yet another notice about getting Commencement Tickets. We all delete the new Inside Hamline email. The end of the semester is at hand.

The finish line manifests itself in different ways, different visions. For some, it may appear as a new job offering, or perhaps a month spent in a foreign country at the conclusion of finals week. Maybe the end is the final payment on a car loan, or the reunification of student with home. Regardless of its form, this last month is usually﹣perhaps undoubtedly﹣obscured by the mire of work yet to be done.

For seniors, the home stretch is a brutal affair. Ask around; we are mountains struggling to make diamonds with pressure. It is a matter of writing the beginning of the next chapter while not having finished the current one, and the list of tasks to reconcile can inspire paralysis. Four weeks to wrap up seminar projects, essays, student org obligations, pay the rent, pay the loans, call the parents, call your bosses, call your pets (feed your pets), heed your social calls, win that job, live that job.

No time for it all.

My own situation finds me squeezed between academics, a job hunt and transitioning to a new apartment. These threads all simplify to money issues in one way or another, and, unless your parents pay for tuition, money is a constant stressor for the Hamline student. This hardly leaves room for any real introspection due to the seismic life-shift on May 19, but by Fayneese I can try.

Caught between a rock and a loan bill, the graduating senior can scarcely reflect on the present moment. But if they were to pause and examine their collegiate career, I expect they would at once feel much the same as they were at the onset, while also barely recognizing the person they grew into. This is an odd burden of maturing here: you will learn if the ambitions you clung to at first are still worth pursuing to the end of your undergraduate tenure. Or perhaps, you will learn if you had the ability to pursue those ambitions in the first place.

Maybe you dropped out after the first semester. Maybe you are finishing your degree after spending ten years raising a kid. Maybe you ended up at Hamline after transferring through multiple schools. Maybe the goals you set for yourself came to fruition: marry a girlfriend, dump a boyfriend, switch majors, write a screenplay, start a nonprofit, play an instrument (competently). Maybe none of them did.

Four years ago, I believed that at this point in my life I would be preparing for grad school with a newly minted degree in physics and eyeing a long and prosperous career as an electrical engineer working for companies like Starkey or 3M. Now, I am wrapping up my English degree and that best-selling novel is still in the pipeline, having hit a jam two states back.

These course corrections would be totally comfortable if a string of what-ifs were not also attached. What if: a physics degree would have procured me a job after college by now? What if: I am not the writer my high school English teacher told me I was? What if: I bet against the Vikings’ last playoff season? Summarized, these questions are emblematic of an unbearable fact of not knowing what latter May will look like, or the future beyond.

“Everyone finds their place,” one kind professor has told me. “You can’t worry yourself to death over the future.”

Well … maybe. But I have spoken with enough beggars on the corner of Snelling and Concordia to know they are none too satisfied with their place, and I am paranoid enough to fear joining them one day.

That is the nut of graduation. Harried accomplishment married with a full-tilt seat-of-your-pants coaster ride into that lava-filled mine shaft from the Indiana Jones movies. Just take the plunge, pay your bills and hope you land on your feet without breaking your ankles. So long as we are all still job-hunting (right, guys?) and the parents have not booted us from the house, this is the best we can do until the big bucks come. Anyone trying to sell you an easy finish is probably pushing a sales job with Vector Marketing. Don’t bite.