News-Letter

For many seniors, the prospect of graduation is like a silent, static-filled charge in the air that raises the hair on their necks every time the thought of a cap and gown flits across their minds. For others, it is a light at the end of a dark tunnel.

As of this writing, there are 49 days left until Hopkins' roughly 1,000 seniors graduate and enter the real world. Some of my classmates, it would seem, have been ready for the real world since they were freshmen. However, this is a rare breed. It remains that the vast majority of Blue Jays falling out of the "nest" are woefully under-prepared for life on the ground. And perhaps where it hits us most is in the question: What am I going to do with my life?

Most seniors would agree that those who are going straight into grad school, having suffered through a final year of board exams and cross-country interviews, at least have the easiest future: a known one. To those who are going straight to the working world, as I am, we're exceedingly lucky if we've found a job in today's tight market. Even if we have, we are on the verge of leaving the bubble for the first time.

It's also a time when the ideals we've developed as college students begin to collide with the economic realities of being in the working world. There's the old story of the liberal-minded college student proudly entering the real world, seeing the withholding on his first paycheck and immediately declaring himself conservative.

One thing that does help upperclassmen at Hopkins adjust to the real world is that most upperclassmen live off-campus. It is an invaluable experience to live, during college, as a tenant who is (often for the first time) outside the authority of any parent or resident advisor. For graduates of most four-year universities, this level of independence isn't reached until after graduation.

So I suppose we Hopkins seniors have been given a nice headstart. Maybe the situation isn't as bad as I initially thought. And yet, doubt still sets in.

An extremely common tendency among college students is one towards procrastination. I called Professor Steven David, a prominent professor in the Political Science department who has long taught the popular Contemporary International Politics. I asked David, "If you were to assign an average 100-student class three weeks to complete a five-page paper, what percentage of those students do you estimate would have begun the paper more than two days before it was due?" David, noting that his answer was "purely speculative," guessed 50 percent.

His estimate and mine were alike. And the pervasiveness of this procrastination made me wonder whether it was affecting some bigger questions we had left to answer before we walked across the stage. At this point, that paper's due in just a few days. And I doubt more than half of us have started writing it.

-- Joshua Robinson is a senior International Studies major from Potomac, Md.

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