I am a senior.
I will be graduating from The Master’s University in May 2022, just like I had always planned, and yet it still feels wrong.
I think people often overlook what it was like for those of us who were in the middle of college when COVID-19 swept across the world. I was a sophomore and sometimes I feel like I still am.
We were sent home for a two-week spring break in March of 2020 and didn’t see campus again until August. Zoom was all we knew for the end of our classes that semester and for the semester to follow.
Time seemed to barely move those months I spent in my dorm room, logging in and out of class, talking with my roommate in between. The social life of meeting people in the dorm lounges that I had grown to love was gone, and the plans I used to make with friends weren’t the same.
I didn’t know how to be 20 years old in a 2020 world.
After some time, I decided to separate myself from the life I had known from August 2018 to March 2020 and start over. I was terrified.
I started taking myself out to get smoothies and just go sit on a bench somewhere to drink it. Many would look at this as a sad thing to do, but I needed it.
The life I had known for two years was no longer viable and in order to be okay with that, I knew I would need time where it was only me. It was only me making choices of what to do, where to go and what time to do it all.
For about three weeks, this was my life and I could see God working in it, so I left it up to Him (as if I had a choice.)
He brought new people into my daily routine and, in some way, my college experience started over, but the classes never stopped. They have, as they are meant to, continued to increase in difficulty, making the academic aspect of my senior year such a challenge.
I missed out on the social life and energy I have right now in my sophomore and early junior year, so how do I manage that in my senior year?
My friends are graduating, I’m graduating. Some of my friends have more time to spend at TMU and now I have to learn how to maintain the college friendships most of my classmates have had since freshman year, and if I should maintain them at all.
It seemed like an impossible task in fall of 2020 that one day I would finish all of my classes, move out of a TMU dorm and be thrust into the world of adulthood. Now I’ve done my senior contract. Now I’ve registered for the last time. Now I have to leave.
I am a senior but I don’t feel like it; and I have to be okay with that.
The TMU Mane 