Seniors: A New Chapter

Giving advice as if I’m qualified to Ruby Hudson, Staff Writer

If you’re a senior, I’m sure you’ve heard it by this point: the “I’m going to miss you so much” or the “It’s gonna be so weird here without you”. You reassure your friends that you still have a couple months of school left and you’ll see them in the summer, and you’ll still be back for the holidays, but have you thought much about it? Your friends seem to be preparing for your departure, but are you? For those going out of town for college, it is a big life change that can be shocking at first and there are a lot of things we, as seniors, need to know before that time. Taking the advice of former college graduates (aka my parents) and current college students, I give you a list of some important things to consider:

1. You’re going to be independent. You won’t be living with your parents anymore, so you will suddenly be given more control over the choices you make. This is your chance to find your true self and to let yourself flourish in this new environment. However, you could go the other way with this and make bad decisions, but it is whatever you make it.

2. You have to learn to do things for yourself. I mean laundry, food, dishes, groceries, etc. Make sure that before you leave, mom teaches you how to do your own laundry or how a laundromat works. Don’t wait to do laundry until you have no clothes, don’t mix whites and colors, don’t overdry new clothes, the list goes on and on. Finding food is easy enough, but if you make it yourself, the dishes in the sink won’t magically wash themselves.

3. You need to go to class. You don’t have a tardy bell, and sometimes the professor doesn’t take attendance because you will be in such a large class. It can be tempting to skip a class every now and then, but skipping one class can put you behind, and catching back up isn’t as easy in college. There’s no posting lecture recordings to Schoology and sometimes you can’t email the professor about what they did in class. Either go to class or find a