Last night, my roommate and I began talking about where to live next year and realized we wouldn't be living in dorms for much longer. Although this was something we knew would happen since first enrolling at Emory, the reality of it hit us only when we physically sat down and began looking for apartments.
We are both usually calm people, but the more we talked about where to live the more we started to freak out. And it wasn't just over the distance we would have to walk to class next year. It started off by me saying that this would be the first time I would live in a real apartment without living with my immediate family. Then we started to discuss how we would have to come up with a cleaning schedule (because we barely manage to clean our dorm even though it is only one room). Then we started talking about meal plans, and how we would have to buy groceries to cook meals – whole meals, as opposed to the fruit, cheese and gogo squeeze we currently buy for when we are hungry at weird times. We realized we were turning into adults.
I remember the first day of senior year in high school, one of my teachers told us "now only your bodies change, your minds stays the same". I thought she was crazy. How could a forty-year-old with children think the same way as I did? How could anyone in college think the same way as I did?
Although I have matured over the past two years, I have realized that there was more truth to this statement than I had thought. As I start to think about where to live next year, or what classes to take next semester, I am realizing that I am supposed to be an adult now, and I have no idea how this happened. I am almost done with my general education requirements, which means that I have to focus more on my major or majors, which means that I have to start making important decisions towards defining what my major is going to be. I have to start thinking about and applying for internships for the summer of 2019, and this time I believe I have to do something more related to what I want for my future career, which means I have to start thinking ahead to when I graduate from Emory, and 2021 suddenly doesn't seem that far off at all.
I have written previously about how the freshmen fifteen phenomenon is real, and now I am proposing the Sophomore Existential Crisis hypothesis: a time of transition in our college careers from the halfway house that are college dorms to the beginnings of adulthood.
