by Aaron Butts
It’s exam week and we’re all feeling it. The strain of exams right around the corner, mixed with a sense that if you fail that one general education course you’ll be kicked out of college and your parents will stop loving you. Nobody is feeling the strain more than seniors as the infamous ailment of “Senioritis” sweeps across campus like the plague.
I set out to find two seniors, one who has another semester still to go, and one who is graduating in a little over a week.
Billy Magginis is taking his senior year in stride. With still another semester to go before graduation in May, Magginis has a long way to go. Luckily for him, he prepared for his eventual bout of Senioritis.
“I knew I was going to have this desire to not want to do work, so I decided that as soon as I had my thesis researched I’d write it and just get it all done ahead of time,” Magginis said. “Now it’s the little things – the two page papers – that I have to do for applications that are tough to bring myself around to doing, so I have to force myself to do them.”
On the other side of the coin, there is senior Dan Bosworth, who is facing his last week as an undergraduate before heading on to the adult world.
“It’s really starting to sink in right now,” Bosworth said. “I thought it would have sunk in earlier, but really it’s now when I’ve already signed a contract for work and I actually start on the 16th.”
Although Magginis and Bosworth aren’t in exactly the same boat with what they are doing after graduation, or even when they are graduating, both are getting dragged down after years of monotonous reflection papers and midterms.
“I can’t even find the energy to do it until it’s due,” Bosworth said. “I just had to turn in a rough draft for ethics, not even a full paper, and I didn’t do it until this morning, which is awful. I’m just running out of steam here at the end.”
Magginis agreed, having to face a constant stream of grad school applications, which require him to write sometimes as little as two page essays that feel like they might as well be eight pages. For someone suffering from as severe a case of senioritis as Magginis is, even the smallest of tasks can seem insurmountable,
“I sit there and write a paragraph, but then I realize, ‘I don’t want to do this anymore,’” Magginis said.
A common symptom for those suffering from senioritis is also the mistaken feeling of youth, followed by the crushing realization that they’ll soon have to grow up and be an adult with adult responsibilities. For Bosworth, he feels this in the thought of joining the workforce so soon.
“I don’t feel old,” Bosworth said. “I don’t feel like the people that I see when I look around at my job. Those people seem a lot older, but really in two weeks they’re going to tell me that I’m the same as them and that’s bizarre to me.”
For Magginis, his symptom revealed itself a bit more subtly.
“The one sign that really hit me that I’m a senior was when I spent ten hours in the library one day, and when I got out I was thinking, ‘I could go back to my room and sit and do nothing like I usually do, or I could go get a beer,’ and I couldn’t do that before,” Magginis said. “I couldn’t go relax at a bar where I’m just sitting and people are talking but I’m just listening. That’s definitely the moment that you’re getting older. Not so much the drinking, but rather that you’re doing a lot of things that you saw adults doing, and now all of a sudden you’re becoming one of them.”
Now both of them can only look to the young, innocent faces of the freshmen who have just arrived at college and have no idea what they are in for in another three years. Both Magginis and Bosworth wished to lend to the new freshmen their elderly wisdom that comes from years of experience.
“Enjoy [college],” Bosworth said. “Obviously that means different things to different people, but enjoy it because you’ll be done before you know it. And once you’re working, there’s no going back to now.”
“You have four years to explore, so do it,” Magginis said. “If you have an interest in any subject, just try it. Capital definitely offers those opportunities to try those things.”
For now, hundreds of seniors with senioritis can only look forward to next Thursday when they and their friends can throw back a pitcher of Keystone at the Zig in celebration of that “C” they got in ethics. While for the moment they are still trapped in that cloud of apathy and ennui as they struggle to get another page written for that one paper that was due back in October, fighting for every paragraph through the pain of their crippling senioritis.
abutts@capital.edu
