Final Blog Post

Dear Class of 2023,

   The odds were against us from (almost) the beginning, but we're here, four years later. No matter how many religions, sciences, philosophies say that time doesn't fly, I'm here to argue that, in our case, it did. We didn't get to live every moment of our college days to the fullest together like Zen Buddhism promotes. We spent months and months that added up to nearly two years at home, living out our college years from our childhood bedrooms with cautious parents begging us to remember to stay six feet apart from our middle school best friends when we went on masked, outdoor walks just to pass the time. I don't count my time at home as part of the college experience, so really, we could all be going around saying we graduated early since we really only had two years on campus.

    But why would we want that? College is supposed to be a crucial time in our lives where we gain independence, learn what we want to do with our lives, and make lifelong best friends. Well, I did learn a lot during my two years at home. Things like how my mother likes her silver polished, how much money it takes a nonprofit to run (and how much money it can handle not making during a global recession), and how to be the best online Zoom college student there is. Not our hopes and dreams for college, I'm sure. Those years really flew.

    But we'll always have the beginning of freshman year, still my fondest time in college. We constantly met new people, tried new things, experienced Baltimore for the first time, and expanded our worlds ten fold. We lived each of those days to the max, and for that we should be ever grateful. I remember feeling that everything and everyday was an adventure for me to embark on. That spring we lost our first classmate – a sudden death on our fourth day away from school after getting sent home for the pandemic. Our first loss, and we were apart. Time is precious, it surely reminded us of that. We had to try our best to make the most of these beautiful lives we've been given. Easier said than done when the world was on lockdown and so were our hearts.

    Our sophomore year was a wash and a blur at the same time. A full semester of Zoom University, and a spring that would've been better off fully online. For some of us, it was fully online, and for others, we wished it was as we lived through near-constant CARP regulations. Time has never felt so slow as those endless winter days of second semester sophomore year drug on.

    Then, junior year, we made up for it. Some of us got to live our dreams of traveling abroad, while others embraced being real college students for the first time since the beginning of our freshman year. I got both, and it was everything I hoped and more, I just wished we had more time. Time really is so precious, you know. The year flew by because we were having fun. Busy were the days post-lockdown. Meals with friends we hadn't seen since freshman year, seeing how the city changed since we'd been gone, remembering how much there really is to the world. We got to do it all.

    Now, here we are. We were reminded again this summer how precious time is when we lost another beloved classmate. Another soul we lost too soon, their time with us cut far too short. With the memory of those no longer physically with us, here we are at the end of our first semester of senior year. We have one semester left, its ours to live to the fullest. It will be our first time on campus in the spring together as a full class, and we'll be the luckiest grade to pass through Loyola in nearly five years. An unrestricted, real, full, senior spring (knock on wood!). We have to keep making up for lost time, and we must remember to make every day an adventure. This is our chance to be a united class and embrace the beauty that is college.


Make the most of it,

Clare

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