For some people, summer is a magical chance to have the time of their lives. During those precious few months, they can completely kick back, erase all the stress from the school year, and make lasting memories with the people they love.

That's never been the case for me. Sure, I imagine it might be, thinking how I could finally have time to catch up with old friends or relatives. In reality, though, I tend to make many vague "plans" involving the notoriously unreliable phrase "we should hang out sometime," and follow through with hardly any of them. I certainly enjoy summers -- it's not like I lock myself away in an air-conditioned cell during those months -- but I generally keep myself busy with projects and spend time with only a few select people. I've realized I keep to myself during the summer because I become lost without school to structure my social life around.

I've never been good at just "hanging out." I like to actively do things, to discuss important topics instead of small talk, and to accomplish a goal instead of being lazy. School, therefore, provided the perfect platform for me to interact with like-minded people while still feeling productive. Since high school, my friends have either been people I know from school or people I met doing theatre. Both provided a structured type of socialization and, since I was at school almost all day and rehearsing most nights, I was able to see my friends regularly without lifting a finger to initiate spending time together. When I did spend time with people outside the context of school, these plans were usually made while waiting for class or when we ran into each other on campus. School planned my social life for me; it gave me scheduled times during which I could socialize and also allowed me ample time to get my personal work done.

The school scene just described was my experience at Western Washington University. Depending on the exact situations of your educational life, the social world of school may be different. There's high school, of course, in which you typically have classes with roughly the same people and sharp social groups tend to emerge. In community college, I took a wide variety of classes and rarely saw the same people twice. I made friends through clubs and the Honors Society because my classmates changed so frequently. At a higher level of education, you tend to be around others of your major. Since those people share similar interests, you are likely to find friends there, but it is limiting in the sense that college students are less likely to get an opportunity to meet with students studying different subjects. Students who live on campus can interact freely with those sharing their living space. While I never got to know many people in my dorm, that is certainly a route many use to get to know people.

Throughout these past years, I have based almost my entire social life on school, and now that I am graduating, I must learn to restructure my thinking. School relationships are strange because you always know they are fleeting. Of course, some people stay in touch with their classmates for the rest of their lives, but most of the people you have seen every day in class will just disappear to live their own lives. After graduation, some move on to another institution, some travel, some return to their home towns. Everyone scatters and, particularly if you incline towards introversion like me, it can be nearly impossible to catch all the pieces.

Graduates will (hopefully) be entering the work force for earnest next, and this will become the new activity around which much of our social lives are structured. As we separate from our old classmates, we make room for new colleagues. I expect it will be destabilizing as well as refreshing to create a new social circle. Whether you are graduating or just enjoying summer break, I hope everyone gets to spend time with the people they love. For me, it is time to wrap up the loose ends of my time as a student and untangle my social life from school.