I’m a senior, who the $#@! are you?

Part of me can’t believe I’m actually writing this – a few weeks into the last semester of my senior year and exactly four years from the day I got my acceptance letter to Carolina and found out I would be a Tar Heel.

Where did the time go?

Chances are, if you ask me what I’m doing after graduation, it’ll go one of two ways. First, I might cry, or second, you might receive threats of physical pain. You have been warned.

I think for every senior, there’s a general feeling of uncertainty and helplessness when we think about upcoming graduation. Most of us don’t have a job yet, and even those who do are probably nervous about moving to a new city or leaving the familiarity of college life.

We wear our Senior Class of 2016 buttons and stickers proudly, and cut lines with the excuse of “I’m a senior,” because embracing it full on is better than thinking too much into it.

Most of us have a bucket list of things we’d like to do before we graduate – eating at certain restaurants we just haven’t gotten to, running the Tar Heel 10 Miler, seeing a hipster band we’ve never heard of at Cat’s Cradle, or maybe being finals streakers.

As I write these things down on the chalkboard of ideas my roommates and I have, I almost don’t want to start crossing things off. The more things I cross off, the more real it becomes.

A lot of us say we wish we could go back to our freshman year. I’d say that’s true, but only if I could relive everything exactly the way I did the first time around. Don’t get me wrong, I made a lot of stupid mistakes and there are things I’m not too proud of during my college years, but all of these things made me the person I am today.

At the end of the day, Eve Carson said it best: “I love UNC. I love the quad in spring and the arboretum in the fall. I love the Pit on a sunny day and Graham Memorial Lounge on a rainy one. I love Roy all the time. But what makes UNC truly special is not our beautiful campus, our distinguished reputation or even our basketball team. It’s us – the student body – who make UNC what it is.”

Even though I don’t want to leave, come May, I get to graduate and become an alumna of this wonderful university. I guess that isn’t so bad.

Shout out to the Class of 2016. Raise hell this semester, y’all.