Graduation a bittersweet end, beginning

By Brian Reinhart     5/16/10 7:00pm

I have a bit of advice for underclassman readers: Find something about Rice you can learn to hate.Hopefully this will be easy. If you cannot hate Rice, though, at least get tired of it. Boredom, or even an itch to get out of here, will make graduation that much easier.

As a third-year senior, I find myself woefully unprepared to leave the university. I was only starting to get bored with the repetitive class offerings, only beªginning to contemplate the possibility of excitement outside the hedges. I had barely begun to explore the city of Houston and was hardly done building friendships with my neighbors. And, well, the story does not feel like it should be ending.

Graduation is a cruel thing. We spend our years here settling in, creating networks of friends, getting involved in a multitude of clubs, connecting with professors and searching for subjects that inªspire us. The full Rice experience is more wonderful, more immersive, than any of the admission brochures claimed it would be.

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So spend a moment thinking how you'll prepare to pack up and leave your current life. Then put the thought out of your mind and enjoy the moment, and when time-management conflicts arise, remember that you will have plenty more opportunities in life to do work and stress out. There is a reason we seniors take our fun seriously.

Next, remember that the ties are not cut forever, and that graduating is final, but not mortal. I had a conversation with a professor recently in which I wondered if graduation was a little like dying. Your classes are conveniently over in time for your funeral, but everything else about college life comes to a hasty and arbitrary close, and not necessarily when you want it to.

"Don't think of graduation as dying," my professor told me. "It's more like being born." Now, still living in this moment, still writing Thresher columns in my Wiess College common room, that advice is hard for me to accept. But, if all goes well, a year from now, it will make perfect sense. Of course, it's hard to move on because I am not ready to leave Rice, but this next step will also plunge me into the unknown, replete with the uncertainty I've largely ignored during my time here.

And, if I were sitting down to write this column a year from now, maybe I would open it differently. Maybe my advice for underclassªmen would be not to find someªthing about Rice to dislike, but to start finding things outside of Rice you can love. Better than getting bored here is getting excited about what happens next.

The more work you put into making Rice a better place and the more you put down roots inªside the hedges, the harder it will be to walk across the stage at Commencement, go home and wait for your diploma to arrive in the mail. Is it worth it? Undoubtedly. But while you have the best years of your life so far, remember two things.

First, the ending will be difficult.

Second, the ending is also just another beginning in disguise.

Brian Reinhart is a Wiess College alumnus and former Thresher calendar editor.

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