The end of a semester is often stressful and comes up quickly. Every semester for 100 years, students at Rowan University work tirelessly to finalize assignments, complete club commitments, and study for finals. And then one day, you wake up and graduation is two weeks away.  

It comes faster than you’d expect. What was once only the stressors of an ending semester, added are anxieties of what to wear and who to invite for graduation, wondering when you will have time for pictures on top of final assignments, and navigating where you’re going to go next. 

I am two weeks away from graduating with a bachelor of arts degree in journalism, and the feelings surfacing are in a whirlwind. I have spent four years studying a passion of mine, I have spent four years learning to be an adult and to live in a convoluted and confusing world, and I have spent four years navigating the trials and tribulations of living life in your twenties in 2024. 

Graduation is supposed to be a time of celebration for your achievements, to feel accomplished, and most of all, to feel relieved that the journey you’ve worked tirelessly at has come to an end. 

Yet at the same time, times of graduation bring a force for a course of change in life. For me, it has felt that with both moments of graduating from high school and college, there has been an extra added life lesson that welcomes me with a punch to the throat. 

Four years ago, I spent the remainder of my senior year in online classes, wearing masks, and foregoing the most important aspects of a high schooler’s experience in their last year due to the pandemic. My class was lucky enough to be able to even walk in graduation, but without our parents there to see us, the meaning was lost. Students were left to learn appreciation with loss embedded into what we could experience. A valuable life lesson. 

Now, with just two weeks left before my college graduation, I have been left to fight for the very thing I have studied for years. With a budget cut, comments of misunderstanding, and ignorance, I have had to sit and listen to peers express a lack of importance to the student-run newspaper that has consumed most of my college life. 

If you have never had someone blatantly disregard any importance, or refer to the thing you care for most in life as a “dying field,” it’s emotionally gut-wrenching. To feel undermined for what you have studied, and spent thousands of dollars to have an immense understanding of the subject is to learn valuable lessons. 

To say this is to further a point I wish to make, and that is: out of everything that one experiences through their years at college, resiliency is the lesson to carry with you forever. 

College and even high school are the most pivotal eight years of a person’s life in which you are learning who you are, what your place is, and what your passions are. Who you are and the mindset you had in high school are monumentally different than what you have now. 

Even two years ago, in college but only halfway done, my mindset was wildly different and immature from what it is now. 

From lessons in friendships gained and lost, lessons in deadlines and public speaking, lessons of career aspirations and how to get a job, and lessons of dealing with major problems one has to experience to grow, we have gained the pieces that make the puzzle we need to start the journey of the rest of our lives. 

During my time at The Whit and throughout college, I have created meaningful friendships that I hope will last a lifetime. I have written powerful opinion pieces meant to impact my peers while putting pieces of myself and beneficial lessons I’ve learned throughout. I have met, interviewed, and written about fascinating people and things on and off campus. I have taken every lesson learned to hold with me for the rest of my life. There is so much growth to blossom from here, but these past four years being a member of a college newspaper organization and a student at Rowan University has set me on track to be successful and influential in all I set out to accomplish. 

So, as I bid this farewell, I wish for anyone who has ever read my writing to know that graduating from college is an accomplishment, and all the time spent, memories kept, and lessons learned should be preserved in everyone’s heart. Take who you are now, be your truest self, and never give up on what you care about. 

Whatever path I may take, I will carry lessons of life with grace. And I will never stop advocating for the importance of journalism. 

For you, I hope that you too remain true to yourself and remain strong in what you are passionate about. Keep your college lessons close to you as you grow.

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