Penn Editorial 5.1.12

It’s stopped feeling like it’s too early to say good-bye. Whether you’re saying good-bye to IUP and Indiana for the summer, for a few weeks, not at all, or - gasp - forever, it might be time to dig our noses out of our textbooks and think about that.

(It might be too early. But we have to save the editorial in the finals edition for finals, so it’s now or never.)
We’re not going to be trite about it, or get too deeply into the argument about whether or not you can ever “go home,” as it were. We’re not even going to suggest (much) that nostalgia is always for something that never existed in the first place.

We’re only going to point out that this is the only time in your life that things will be exactly as they are. Even if you’re coming back next year, or if you’re taking summer classes and barely even leaving, even if you live full-time in Indiana, things are going to be different next year. Hell, things are going to be different next week. They’re going to be different tomorrow. If you’re graduating and continuing to graduate studies, here or at another university, that’s going to be a change, a big one.

This is a blessing and a curse. If this semester has been one of the best times of your life, it’s a saddening thought. Things might be this good again, we’re not that pessimistic - and we’re certainly not the sort who think that our lives peaked in high school.

But good, better, spectacularly awesome, it’s going to be different. If this semester was a traumatic experience, it’s an encouraging feeling to be able to close the books on it and say “next year will be better.”
And that’s the way to look at it - that this may have been great, or it may have been awful, but what’s coming next will be better. Awesome. Exciting. Different.

Sometimes it doesn’t look that way from here, and sometimes it’s absolutely terrifying, but guess what?
Even though it’s going to be hard, and definitely different than the present, the future will be pretty fantastic. Think of it that way.