McGill Tribune

You know you’re in third-year when a) Most of your friends are caffeine addicts, and b) All your friends have anxiously started muttering phrases like “damn internships” and “admissions GPA” under their breath. Days of first-year bliss, when hitting the bib for 30 minutes on a Saturday would be overdoing it, are long gone. Around the corner looms what our collective consciousness calls—cue scary Star Wars music—the next step.

Whether this next step is grad, med, or law school, or trying to gain work experience, it sends most of us into a strange sense of shock. Now I know some people claim to have everything figured out. Those with 4.0s, or a rich uncle at Google. Well, screw you guys. Turn to Student Living or Sports; this column ain’t for you.

This shock usually manifests itself in two ways: nervous frenzy and deer-in-headlights, the former generally leading to the latter. At first you start looking at all the options, a possible Masters program here, a possible Starbucks stint there. Then the info builds up. You visit internship conferences that show you all the exciting things people are doing (and so can you!), then you attend CV workshops, where you realize it’s surprisingly difficult to market serving fajitas every summer at local fairs. Then the admission requirements start to kick their way into your dreams.

Slowly but surely, your third year becomes one convoluted microcosm of the rat race, with all the ways to run faster and harder filtering through your daily life.

As the nervous frenzy hits a crisis point you shift to deer-in-headlights mode. Now you’re that guy staring blankly up the stairs in Cyberteque, coffee already cold in your hands. Or that gal who studies the numbers in the McLennan elevators, but never presses one, and never gets out on a floor. The rat race still swirls by, but now its words are slurred and it moves in slow motion. You go to class but wonder if it’s relevant. You look at your professors with their comfortable jobs, pretty PowerPoint slides, geeky jokes, and you start to seriously resent them.

It would be nice to say that come fourth-year, the clouds part, and, amidst angelic singing choirs, Heather Munroe-Blum descends with a platter of job options and a buffet of career trajectories. But it’s  just not true. Partly because I’m more suspicious of the world than I used to be, and partly because I’m still in third-year, still looking up at that titanic next step, in the same boat as you. Which, I suppose, is actually comforting. We’re still here together, in the world of midterm exams and Super Sandwich, of spring breaks and student columnists. It’s not such a bad world, even if we have no idea what the one after it will be like.

So here’s my slightly sentimental challenge: enjoy your time here. Especially those of you who are nearing the end of a degree, with other stresses slowly pressing in. Take time to stroll to parts of the city you’ve never seen. Talk to new people at Gert’s. And when the next step fears hit, by all means, deal with it, but remember: for now, you’re still here.