Hannah Jones/Winonan

Here’s a bold thought: we’re a month away from closing another school year.

Another year of studying, staying up late, falling asleep in public, eating fantastic food, eating atrocious food, working, playing, making friends and surfing “WSU Cupid” is coming to a close. This will mark my third—and penultimate—before I graduate and hit that thing they call the “real world.”

This is the part when I say that I have utterly no desire to leave, that I adore every second of being a student, that I could imagine no other way to live, that I think the burgers at Coyote Jack’s taste and smell like rose petals, etc.

But, let me be frank: that’s not what I’m feeling right now.

Let me put it in visual terms. At home, I have a dog; a lhasa with a body like an overstuffed burrito and the face of an angel—if an angel had fangle teeth and eyes that could look north and south at the same time. When I’m home, she and I take frequent walks together.

When we begin, fastening the leash and buttoning up against the cold, we’re both pretty excited. My dog, I’m sure, loves the idea of the wind in her fur and the opportunity to catch up on who has been peeing where.

I love the idea of giving my dog some much-needed exercise so she won’t take our her excess energy by barking at parked cars, and the prospect of slimming her down to a trimmer burrito shape. We always launch out of the front door, full of enthusiasm, full of promise.

This usually lasts for about 20 feet.

After the first stretch of  sidewalk, my dog abruptly realizes two things:

1. She is old, fat and arthritic.

2. This walk is not nearly as novel as it had been about 20 feet back.

I feel exactly the same way about college. I don’t mean to say that attending school isn’t pleasurable for me anymore. Far from it. However, like my fat dog, I’ve gotten a sense that it was high time I moved onto something else.

At this juncture in a college student’s life, there tends to be a lot of mixed feelings. Many people express regret about entering the “real world” because they have no concept of what it will be like, what they will do in it and how they will live day to day. Most people in the real world do not close out the Smaug studying or go to Grocery Bingo or get novels for assigned reading. These things, so familiar to most of us, will suddenly disappear, leaving in their wake a new, uncharted, frightening world.

Sometimes, when I go down this particular line of thinking, I do as my dog does about 20 feet after leaving home: I dig in my heels and try to stop right where I am.

This, of course, is impossible. Whether it’s back home or down a different path, the journey must continue somewhere. We cannot stall forever, and we cannot stop moving forward just because we’re not sure of what lies ahead. Just around the bend could be something wonderful or something terrifying, but we’ll never know until we get there.

That’s what I tell my dog, anyway.

She never listens.

As for myself and my colleagues, the bottom line is essentially the same. The march of time continues whether we’re ready for it or not, and by the time our third year of school is over, most of us are, in fact, ready. We are ready to try something new, to take that next big step, to become a “real” person in the “real” world.

And yes, most of us are terrified.

I know I am, anyway.

So, as the year comes to a close, I look back on six wonderful semesters, and look forward to two more and finally, graduation. I remember my nervousness and excitement when I started. I imagine the same feelings coming to me on my first day in a day job.

And then I tug the leash, put one foot in front of the other, and drag that reluctant, burrito-shaped part of me down the path.

Contact Hannah at [email protected]