I'm a SENIOR, who the #@#! are you?

I've spent the last three years of college delaying the inevitable. Now there is no more delaying.

Being a senior is awfully bittersweet. On one hand, I'm almost done with school forever and can move on and start my career. On the other hand, I don't have the safety net of school for much longer and I have to move on and start my career.

I feel like I'm finally a real person. By "real" I mean more responsible: not the college student that goes to class, sleeps, drinks and repeats. I have more cares in the world then where the big party is. I used to have so much free time that I didn't even know what to do with myself. I spent a lot of time playing video games, watching Netflix movies and reading books other than those required for class. Now I barely have time to think.

I started an internship at Chapel Hill Magazine this week. It's a great opportunity and I enjoy working there. But combining that with my job at the bookstore, my classes and band, it means that most days I am going from 9 a.m. to 8 p.m. I have to consciously think of time management and make sure that I keep up all of my obligations. I'm not used to that.

I know that this is what I have to look forward to when I join the working world, but I'm not yet in the working world. I feel like I should still be able to have a slack semester where my only real concern is where the alcohol is going to come from. College is only (usually) four years of your life, and I want to be sure that I make the most of those years. But I can't. It won't be the same as my earlier college years. And not by choice: I'm not done with that stage yet.

Most college kids are lucky enough to have a stalling mechanism set up for their post-graduation years: graduate school. It's the perfect cop-out when you're not ready to join the real world, just keep on taking some schooling. Unfortunately graduate school is not in the books for me. The Journalism School isn't really interested in students coming straight out of undergraduate and would rather have you go out and get some experience before coming back.

So where does that leave me? That is the question that I have battled with all summer. I want to have some time to travel and be crazy and enjoy myself before I settle into the working life. Ideally, I would have a job where I could travel and be crazy and get paid for it by some ridiculous travel magazine. Whether I do that or not is irrelevant to this point, though. The fact is that I don't have a clue what I will be doing in nine months, but I need to figure it out. It's either that or move back in with the parents, and they've already said that they won't allow that.

I'm not sure that I'm ready to be thrown out into the real world. I think I need some more time to develop. I don't know if I'll ever be ready for the working world. How do you know? I'm not even sure that I know enough about my self and what I want before we try and figure out what we want.

The Senior Marshals pass out the stickers that say "I"m a SENIOR, who the #@#! are you?" I think the more fitting sticker -- at least in my situation -- is "I'm a SENIOR, who the fuck am I?"