The Time of Your Life

It's the end of April. I sit through the last moments of my final Ethics lecture, bursting with excitement. I scribble notes, one eye on my watch. An open window behind me fills the room with warm sunshine and the tantalizing smell of flowers and sizzling, juicy GUGS burgers.

At last, class ends. Students stampede towards the door and our professor wishes us luck over a roar of footsteps, chatter and zipping bookbags. I've looked forward to this moment all day. Yet as I exit, I almost regret that class is over. Could it be that we are wasting our precious college years constantly waiting for the next big thing?

These past weeks have been a blur of benchmarks for many Georgetown students. After the last homework assignment, the last class and the last exam, summer finally arrives after much hungry anticipation. Some students see it as a time to enjoy home comforts, reconnect with loved ones, and watch reruns in pajamas. Some take courses, some boost wallets and resumés with jobs and internships. And for graduating seniors, summer is a milestone in itself, bridging student life with "real world" adulthood.

Between those much-anticipated benchmarks, most of us have done some serious complaining about the difficulties of life at Georgetown. Popular topics include incurable colds, over-priced coffee, lines, hangovers, papers, exams, relentless wind, steep hills and infinitely deep and muddy puddles. We claim to despise getting sexiled, waking up early and badgering landlords week after week to get our pipes repaired.

Yet there are seniors who cry at graduation. There are adults who call college the best time of their lives. Pop culture, the media and even class textbooks remind us of our good fortune. We can take the attitude that Georgetown life is just a string of long-awaited events, rites of passage and achievements, or we can savor the rich opportunities we have been given: four years to learn everything we can, about everything we can, from everyone we can. Our professors are often extremely knowledgeable and enthusiastic; our classmates hail from all over the world, bringing a myriad of skills, perspectives, and experiences with them; the capital city of a superpower lies just beyond our gates, and we live in the thick of its politics-this really isn't such a miserable time and place to be alive. We have to get past moaning about slow elevators and the endless wait till summer; this is the time to relish our opportunities and make the most of our time here before it's too late.

Massoud-Moghaddam is a Theater and Government freshman.