At the Giants of Science concert last weekend, as the band wrapped up their set one of my best friends grabbed my arm and said, “I don’t want it to end!” I nodded back, “Me neither.” But when I said it, I wasn’t sure what either of us was talking about. This particular Tom Petty cover? The concert? Spring Party Weekend? Or our entire time at Colgate? At that moment all I could think about was how all of these things were ending. Strangely, senior year at Colgate has brought back a lot of memories from senior year of high school, especially the focus on the finality of everything. At the beginning of my second semester of senior year of high school, I remember the girl who sat next to me in French class saying, “This is the last ever first French class of the semester.” I started laughing until I realized she wasn’t joking. Graduation was clearly making her focus on all the things she would be leaving behind, including French class. At Colgate, seniors talk about how many pages they have left to write before they complete their last college paper, how many classes they have left until the semester ends, how many days until Hilton Head and how many more hours they will be spending at Case. I even overheard a senior over SPW wondering aloud if she had attended her last ever Fraturday.

Graduation has also made me think about the beginning as the end approaches. As I write this ar-ticle for the Maroon-News I think back to moving in early to Colgate for Maroon-News pre-orientation. Pre-Orientation was when my grandfather started subscribing to the Maroon-News and he still reads every issue cover to cover. Talking on the phone with him not only reminds me how awesome my grandparents are, but also makes me laugh as my Grandpa and I share our favorite moments from the Campus Safety blotter. Brittani DiMare and Jenn Carey became my two first friends when we decided to eat breakfast together at the Library Caf?e before our first Maroon-News morning meeting. I vaguely remember meeting a girl named Hannah Guy who I was really afraid of. Today, Brittani and Jenn are still two of my closest friends here and I got over my fears enough to become friends with Hannah. Well, some of my fears…I’m still kind of scared of her sometimes.

At the beginning, I never thought I would major in Russian. I never thought I would join a soror-ity. I never thought I would become president of the Colgate Jewish Union. I never thought I would meet friends who would be as close to me as my high school friends. I never thought that I would spend the year after graduation in Ukraine. I never thought I would dip pizza in ranch dressing and enjoy it. Yet, I ended up doing all of those things and could not be happier with those choices. But thinking back to the past four years only makes me realize how much I take for granted about Colgate. It’s easy enough to complain about Colgate; it’s not a flawless institu-tion. As former Commentary editor, I spent a better part of my week reading people’s complaints about Colgate. There have been times at Colgate when all I could think about were the negatives and how much I needed a break from Colgate. I wanted to be somewhere where being over a size 0 didn’t make you fat, where people went out on dates, where $300 ballet flats were not the norm, where I could have a weekend that was actually a break and not just extra time in the library, where the most controversial issue people talked about wasn’t Greek Life.

But as I reflect on both the end and the beginning of my time here, all I can think about is how much I’m going to miss it. I’m so lucky to attend a school where my best friends are just a text and a five-minute walk away, where I can sit in a 50-minute class and learn more than I did in a year in high school, where half of the e-mails I get are offering me free food, where I can walk into any bar and be surrounded by people I want to see, where I’m never bored, where I’m part of a community, where I’m surrounded by the smartest people I’ve ever met, where ev-eryone from your professors to the staff of Hamilton Whole Foods to Michelle Jug knows your name, where I’m challenged to become smarter, more hard-working and a better friend every day.With all this in mind, I’m not going to spend the end of my semester counting down. I’m not going to remind all of you that this my last ever Maroon-News article, or cry over my last slice and ranch or even post on Facebook about completing my last final exam. Instead of counting down, I’m going to make these last few weeks count.

Contact Katie David at [email protected].