Finals? Now? What?

The end of the semester is upon us - only three more days of class! The only really consistent thing about college is how incredibly quickly the time seems to pass, but this semester has gone even faster than most for some reason. Finals week is just a stone's throw away. For me it's a bit anticlimactic; although I'm taking 5 classes for a total of 17 credits this semester, most of them are fairly easy so I only really have a couple finals that I need to worry about for more than a day or so, compared to last year when I studied for my bio and chem finals for several days straight each.

Looking back, this semester has been really good. I have to say, being an upperclassman is great - I didn't expect it to be particularly different, yet in some ways it is. For one thing this was the first semester I didn't have an honors seminar, or a German language class. But more importantly, over the course of the summer and this fall myself and most of the people I know in the class of 2012 have completely turned a corner in terms of knowing what we want to do, having specific goals, going off on our own paths, and the like. One really neat thing about taking upper level classes is meeting all these different people with all kinds of interesting goals ranging from entering the foreign service to attending graduate school in creative writing to becoming physical therapists. Of course, there are still plenty of people who don't know what their next step or their long term plans are - including myself at least 25% of the time - and that's fine too. But the general climate of the people I spend time with has certainly changed.

For me one of the biggest changes is that grad school is now staring me right in the face, and it's way scarier than I thought it would be. I've been talking the talk since I was in my mid-teens - going into neuroscience research was always the big plan for me - but now... all of a sudden it's all so real. The horizon is full of big decisions; am I really ready to commit myself to spending 5 or 6 years in grad school? Am I sure enough about my field to take that plunge? And if so how do I decide where to go? Should I say close to family? Try to end up close to my boyfriend? All of these things seemed so simple and obvious just a year ago...

Ah well, these are choices for another day. In the meantime I've got tests to worry about.

-Celine