As graduation nears, it's a time where many people get sentimental about their time in college, high school, or their university. Often times this can mean that people see it in "rose colored glasses", where bad memories are see in a better light and all of the bad things that you experienced within your time there are swept away and replaced by good memories.

This phenomena is explained in an episode of How I Met Your Mother, where the group warns Ted about breaking up with someone and not getting caught up in all of the good memories together. Although this is appealing, I think there is still value in truly remembering your experience for what it was in order to grow from it and to move on with your life.

A lot of my time at Case Western Reserve University was not happy. I often felt excluded from campus and other students because I was a commuter student, and didn't really fit in because I wasn't involved in sororities or groups that met late and night. I also wasn't the traditional science major, but a double humanities major so I often had a lot of work, but that work wasn't as valued as difficult or challenging by peers because it wasn't a hard science. But, when I finished undergrad, I started to realize how much I would miss CWRU and was sad to be done with that part of my education here.

Now that I am almost done with graduate school here and for now am done with school, I am anxious to leave and wish I could start the experience all over again. In retrospect, it is easy to say this and feel this way, but when I think about how I felt in the middle of the experience, miserable and stressed beyond belief, I would never want to go back to that.

With anything in life, it is easy to look back and think that it was better than it truly was. It could be a job that you miss just because of the people and the discounts (like my retail job that I had for five years) when in reality it was pretty crappy work, or a relationship you had that was not good for your health, but you still sometimes miss that person and the good memories you have with them. There are good and bad things about every experience, no doubt. But the good things should not completely outweigh your bad experiences to skew the entire memory.