The Long Goodbye to College

The Atlantic

3 days ago

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The month of May marks the first anniversary of my college graduation—or, as I call it, the inevitable and dreaded start of my adulthood. This time last year, I questioned what I wanted from my future, endured the implosion of a close-knit social life, parted ways with a failed situationship, and tried to scrub a stubborn beer stain out of my baby-blue graduation gown. I remember the endless parties, cigars that smelled like chocolate but tasted like ash, cheap champagne that we shook and sprayed but hardly drank, all that beer and wine we did drink. Now, as I watch videos of underclassmen donning their own robes, I face the unwelcome reminder that grass grows atop the grave of my college days.
The morning of my graduation, I struggled to follow a TikTok tutorial on how to tie a tie (eventually enlisting my roommate's help) and ate just a bag of Cheez-Its for breakfast. I walked across the stage for all of eight seconds, waving at the crowd without a clue where my family was seated. But none of those gripes mattered, because my dean winked at me as we shook hands and the school's anthem sounded better through Bluetooth speakers than it ever had through brass.
At graduations, even the slightest pageantry is enchanting. One 1923 Atlantic article remarked that merely being asked 'Are you going to Commencement?' provoked joy: 'Commencement had a meaning,' the writer Carroll Perry explained. 'It meant that the Governor of the Commonwealth was coming to Williamstown, and the sheriff of the County of Berkshire, with bell-crown and cockade, in buff waistcoat, carrying a staff. It meant wearing your Sunday suit all day Monday and Tuesday and Wednesday; it meant pretty girls from big cities; pretty girls, in stylish dresses, with wonderful parasols—girls who lived in New York.'
But all of that pomp can be punctured by reality. At my alma mater, Columbia, there was confusion over whether the ceremony would happen at all, because of the campus protests against Israel's war in Gaza. (Ultimately, commencement was canceled and smaller graduation events, including mine, were moved off campus.) Matriculating into adulthood too often means entering a world plagued by conflict. In 1917, amid the throes of World War I, a father wrote a letter to his daughter for her graduation: 'That, my daughter with your sheepskin in your hand, is the world into which you have graduated. It is a world in crisis; a world struggling toward a salvation only to be won by bitter effort,' he wrote. 'No one of us is exempt from contributing what we have and what we are to that endeavor.'
Uncertainty is the word that defines the waning months of college and beyond. Finding a post-grad path is hard, not least because of the pressure to select one that may determine your career forever. Graduate school delays the job hunt by a few years, but the outcomes can vary. 'Now, four years after having obtained an M. A. and a Ph. D., I am seemingly permanently unemployed,' an anonymous graduate, with the byline of 'Ph. D.,' complained in 1940. And the pressure to keep up with your peers, especially financially, never goes away. One writer who was working as a carpenter went to dinner with old college friends, who all made substantially more money than he did, in white-collar positions. 'I think it cheered them somewhat to learn that my hands had not been able to keep pace with their heads, commercially,' he wrote in 1929.
Any recent graduate will tell you that their head felt heaviest after the cap came off. The night after graduation, my friends and I snuck into our freshman-year dorm. We reminisced about our four years together and wrote a message for the dorm's future inhabitants inside an electrical box in the same living room where we first met. And then the sun came up. I loaded my life into cardboard and loaded that cardboard into a minivan and slid my car window down to wave goodbye to it all. 'Thus we launch the schoolboy upon life. Commencement meant commencement; it was the beginning of responsibility. He had to make his own chance now,' the minister Edward E. Hale lamented in an 1893 essay. 'His boyhood was over.'
At some point after the blur of my victory lap, I suddenly found myself back at home, all alone. I'd been asked What's next? by some 20 people by then, but for the first time, I was forced to actually confront the question. I had no answer. I just mourned my boyhood.