I've been in my senior year of college for a full three weeks now. I think it's time for a summary.
My classes are FANTASTIC!! I actually like everything I'm taking. I even love some of the classes. My thesis seminar has just finished meeting, but we spent the eight classes we did have discussing research ethics, the IRB (institutional review board) procedure, and then each student presented his/her thesis project for the class to discuss. While I do not want to personally research every topic that was presented, I do find each project to be fascinating in its own way and totally exciting. My other sociology class is on gangs. It's a typical 50-person sociology class with readings and lectures, but the topic is really cool.
My other two classes are theater classes. The first is sound design, which only met three times before our instructor took a three class hiatus to design a show out of town. He's super cool and super legit, and the class syllabus looks awesome. I can already tell I'm learning a lot.
The other theater class is Creative Drama. It is actually kind of changing my perspective on life. Things that I like or love now have a new definitional lens, and it is so cool. First of all, we mostly play and sing in class. It is so much fun. But the important thing is that we use Creative Drama to learn about human experiences. One of the activities we did in our big introductory improvisation was to write a letter to the character we were playing as a child using the non-dominant hand. It is a form called "writing in role," and the very next afternoon the second episode of the webseries "Emma Approved" (the vlog retelling of Jane Austen's Emma) was posted, and it was written using this very Creative Drama technique. Mind. Blown. Awesome class.
Other than classes and thesis work, I've been doing theater. I realized that I have become the person on campus who lighting people ask about lighting, and that's a weird role for me to have because there's always been one or more people ahead of me in that pecking order. Until now. Like, I have to be the one to teach people how to use truss? That's crazy. It's cool to be a leader, but the strangest thing to find it in this context. I have had a lot of fun working on shows with my friends, and I think there's a certain amount of not caring about impressing people that is making it more fun this year.
And speaking of not caring, I think that's been a pretty nice social shift for me. I'm feeling more relaxed about my place on campus. A large part of that is because so many of my friends have graduated and moved such that I don't see them regularly anymore, but I'm re-equilibrating to a new group of friends and patterns of spending time with people who are awesome.
However, this new social life, role in the theater community, and stage of life are often leading me to get lost in the nostalgia of both the past and the future. I have a pretty concrete idea of what I want to do next (not ready to share), so there's a lot of thinking about how that's going to go, planning ahead, and wondering what my university will be like once I've graduated. On the other hand, I find that the experiences I draw from of things that have already happened that can inform present decision-making involve things I learned from people who graduated. They graduated and are out of living memory. And those memories are strongly biased toward the positive even though I now have the lived experience to hypothesize that my friends were making things up just as much as I currently do. It takes a lot of effort to live in the moment. More effort than ever before.
I've done a lot of thinking about the relationships I have with people who are no longer in my immediate, proximate circle. I came up with a term for those friends who have been both my peers and my mentors. I call it being a "friend-tor" (get it? friend+mentor=friend-tor? I think it's clever.). My friend-tors mean a lot to me, and I'm not exactly sure what about my psychology draws me to these kinds of friendships, but there's something about the idea of caring to pass down knowledge and the ideals of mutual prosperity that keep me loyal to these friend-torships over the years.
I realized a few years ago that once I was no longer a freshman myself, I had the opportunity to influence people the way my friend-tors did for me. I really like the idea of having a legacy, but it's not been obvious to me if I've succeeded in any way at all. However, I did have a conversation with a friend who wanted to consult with me on some lighting stuff, and he told me that I've been that kind of influence for him. This friend is someone who I don't think of as any sort of mentee; in fact, I think he has more courage and creativity as a designer than I do, but it really was a special moment for him to be able to say that to me. I feel like I've accomplished a life goal.
I think that overall, I am quite happy at school this year. Things are good. When I am in the moment, everything is fantastic, but I often find myself lapsing into a world of nostalgia, which can leave me in a strange emotional place. Thus far, the new normal has been pretty great. Breaking it down, the awesome: classes, friends, theater; and the notsome: getting lost in nostalgia, missing friends who have graduated, feeling like that awkward senior in the corner.
Today is awesome because of good conversations.
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