A Retrospective on my College Experience

“From a whole two weeks away”

Alright, here it is, as promised last week. I’m now an official graduate from the University of Illinois. I walked across the stage on May 14th, 2021, and finished my ultimate final the day prior. I have now received a Bachelor’s of Arts of Sciences in Earth, Society, and Environmental Sustainability with a concentration in the Science of Earth Systems (ESES:SES, which is a complete nonsense acronym), and a double major in Creative Writing with a concentration in Fiction, along with a minor in Geography and Geographic Information Systems. That’s a lot of words to fit on one degree, and I haven’t actually seen the thing yet (since they don’t send it out until like July), so I don’t know what it’s going to look like. But I’m done. I’m now a college graduate. And I have no fucking clue what to do next.

But, again, like I said last week, that’s something I’m going to figure out later. For now, I’m sort of taking the summer off, since this may or may not be the last summer I have free before I have to become a “real adult” and get a “real job.” Instead of figuring out where I want to work, though, or if I want to go to graduate school, or if I want to apply to Fulbright again (since they rejected me this last time), or if I want to move to Ireland or something, I’m going to take this time and reflect on the last four years of my life. I don’t know what I want to do or what I want to be, besides the fact that my dream is really to write or make video games for a living, though I’d also love to be a National Park ranger or geography consultant or something. I’d also settle for living in a hole in the ground and becoming a swamp man. But until I settle on something, I’d like to take a mental inventory of some of the stuff that’s happened to me/by me at my time in college. Buckle up. This time, it’s personal. And, uh, brief content warning: discussion of suicidal ideations.

So I’ve got a couple ways I can break this up and structure my thoughts here. I can do it chronologically, or I can do it thematically. For whatever reason, I have a hard time figuring out when things occurred in my existence, so I think I’ll go with the thematic form instead. And for an opening, let me begin with classes. As, y’know, the main reason I went to college. I mean, yeah, I went to college to meet new friends and get blasted in a stranger’s basement, but the first and foremost reason was to get an education. So let’s start there, because I’ve taken a lot of classes; 44, to be exact (and not counting lab sections, either). Over eight semesters, that averages out to around 5 or 6 classes a semester, which makes sense. Well, technically, one semester I took seven classes because I also had a band class that met once a week in the evenings, but I don’t know if that counts because it wasn’t really for a grade or anything. And, hell, I almost forgot I did that! I was in band all through junior high and high school, and I kind of dropped it in college because I just wasn’t interested. But I picked it back up for one semester, and… it didn’t stick, I guess. It’s a shame, really. I played the french horn, and I really liked it. It’s a beautiful instrument. Oh well. I can also play on my own.

Thinking of classes, I took a lot of really cool ones. Like, my first semester, I took one that was all about funerary practices and burial rites in cultures around the world, and that was a ton of fun, as morbid as it sounds. And I took a lot of environmental science and creative writing classes, too, but they kind of all blend together after a while. I remember one creative writing class decently well only because I gave a speech about Dark Souls, but most of the creative writing classes are a bit hard to parse because they’re all workshops. Workshopping writing is a great thing, in my opinion; it’s a perfect opportunity for you to get some other eyes on your paper, and the best part is that whoever’s reading it is required to give you good feedback. It’s a perfect deal! I love workshops! But they’re also emotionally and mentally exhausting, and they all kind of feel the same. So for as great as those classes were, they’re also a bit of a mud puddle in my memory.

The environmental science classes are a little better, in that they’re all about pretty varied topics. Where creative writing classes are really just a linear progression of how seriously other students take the same material, until you reach the end and everyone is secretly competing with each other at all times, environmental science classes have the freedom to bounce between hundreds of topics. That’s why I ended up in earth systems modeling, one of my favorite classes where I learned how to use python code to predict fish populations, and then the next semester learned all about why you shouldn’t mow your lawn so the birds can sit in the grass. I also took a bunch of GIS classes, which I’ve talked about a little bit already, and learned that I really, really like maps. And then, of course, I also had classes about weather, tornadoes, the water cycle, and so on and so forth. The weird part about being in such a broad major, though, is that I never really got that deep into any one topic, except for the GIS stuff (because of my minor), so I kind of feel like a jack-of-all-trades type of thing. It’s something I’ve heard before from other people in my major, too, that they aren’t really sure if they picked up anything in depth enough to make a career out of it, but hey, a degree’s a degree.

But I took a lot of great classes that won’t directly apply to my career, either, and I do not regret that at all; part of the fun of college is taking random-ass classes that don’t make any practical sense, and I certainly got to do that. I took a Shakespeare class, and realized that I actually like Shakespeare; I took a class on Louise Erdrich, and for the first time read assigned books by someone who wasn’t dead; I took an intro to painting class and the professor told me my style was “unique,” which was absolutely code for “you can’t paint but I’m legally required to give you an A anyway;” I took a class on extraterrestrial life, and we concluded that it’s probably out there but not getting to us anytime soon; I took a 100-level physics and chemistry course and managed to not explode during either of them; I took a class about East Asian literature and learned that North Korea has a film industry; I took a class where I designed a building to maximize daylight and then accidentally created a spooky basement workshop; I took a screenwriting class and we watched the first twenty minutes of five different movies and then I never ever watched the rest; I took an economics class which was also the worst class I took at the University, tied only with a class where the professor forgot to give us the midterm and the final; and I took a history class where we watched clips from Sam Raimi’s Spider-Man 2 because it is, and I quote, “a great representation of the Frankenstein story;” and then I took a class that brought me to Rome.

I can’t believe I haven’t talked more about this trip on here. It was one of my first really big experiences in college, and probably one of the best things to happen to me my freshman year. Because freshman year was shit; the only other good thing to come out of that year, besides classes being kind of fun, was that I met my friend Kenny (who, three-ish years later, went to the Great Smoky Mountains with me), and that I joined Students for Environmental Concerns, but more on that later. Freshman year was very rough for me. I had an exceedingly hard time making friends, I didn’t really understand myself or have any level of self-confidence, I had this constant anxiety that I was missing out on something or not doing enough, I was bored in my dorm room half the time, and to top it all off, I was still on the backend of a major suicidal ideation/depressive episode from my senior year of high school. My mom had to come down at least twice to help me make sure I didn’t kill myself. That is, unfortunately, not a joke. At times, the only friend on campus I had was Melanie (who is also, to this day, one of my closest friends). Due to a mixed back of self-loathing, self-destruction, and an a complete lack of social skills, I burned a couple people during my freshman and sophomore years, and I regret that now. I made a lot of mistakes that year, including receiving my lowest grade (an A-), and it’s not something that I wish to relive.

But I got better. I learned more about myself, through self-reflection and through interactions with others. I adjusted my medications, saw therapists, and learned more about what I was feeling and why I was feeling it. I feel incredibly lucky to say that, as of this writing, it’s now been almost two years since a major depressive/suicidal episode, and I’d like to thank my friends and family for helping me through that. It took a while, and it was scary, but I got through it. I can’t say that things always get better, because I think that’s naïve, but I can say, now, that it’s always worth trying. If you or a loved one needs help, you can always call 800-273-8255 for the suicide prevention lifeline. I never used it, personally, but I did use the Crisis Text Line a few times my freshman year. There is no shame in reaching out for help. In the end, besides learning to manage my demons, I also grew up as a person, thanks to my friends and the University, and also thanks to working at Philmont. I can almost single-handedly point to working at Philmont as the thing that made me mature the most as a human. And it isn’t just me that sees it, too. I’ve already talked about Philmont a lot, so I’ll be brief here, but that happened before my junior year of college, and it is possible the single most impactful thing I did during my time at college that wasn’t actually at college.

But back to Rome. Of all the classes I took, as much as I learned in all of them, and as much as I appreciated the educational experiences I got, the Campus Honors Program trip to Rome was far and away the most fun I had in a class, or at any university-sponsored event. That’s because, thanks to COVID, it was also my only study-abroad experience at college. I was supposed to go my senior year (last fall, actually), but, you know, we were in a global pandemic and I wasn’t about to go to Greece for three months. So I treasure those ten days in Rome even more now. Although I am, sadly, no longer in touch with anyone from that trip, I believe I made some close friends and we shared some incredible experiences together. From bar-hopping around the squares to try and find a place that served Guinness for St. Patrick’s day, to making pasta by hand, to going to church on Easter in the Florentine fucking Chapel, to learning and then immediately forgetting basic Italian, to traveling outside of the city to a farm where there were old ruins on the hill, to drinking an entire bottle of limoncello before dinner, to eating a calzone as big as my head, to exploring roman ruins, to all sorts of everything else we could want to do in Rome, it was an experience I’ll never forget. Even if the director of the trip was a bit of an ass, and the vlogs were dumb (though I’m glad I made them now), it was an amazing opportunity, and one that I wouldn’t give up for the world. Side note for myself: we stayed in the Hotel Sola Roma. I want to go back there, some day.

But speaking of things I wouldn’t give up for the world, I had some really great times back on the continent, too. Honestly, some of the best memories I have of my time at college take place not at a bar or in a classroom, but in the parking garage at Allen Hall; my friend Kenny and I, and sometimes his partner Eva, would just do stupid shit in the parking garage for the hell of it, and it was a blast. We smashed pumpkins, dropped fruit from five stories, hit soda cans with golf clubs, smashed Kenny over the head with an old violin, dropped carpets onto people, Kenny jumped into a bush one time, we moved a bike rack, all sorts of total nonsense that was fun not because it had a goal or a designed outcome, but because it was fucking stupid shit that we did because we could. It was great. Doing stuff like that is going to forever be some of my favorite memories from college, especially the first couple years. I’m incredibly grateful that I’m friends with Kenny and Eva, and I’m glad that they both helped me come out of my shell a bit and learn about the joy in indiscriminate destruction and driving around aimlessly for hours.

But Kenny and I did go to parties, too. Prior to COVID, my college experience was great because it felt like every weekend, starting the second semester my sophomore year, I could go out and go to a party or a house show or a bar or something like that. Kenny and I went to random-ass house shows all the time, at places with names like “Waluigi’s Mansion,” and some others that I can’t remember now. They were never any bands I had heard of, mostly local basement types, but that wasn’t the point. We would go, get smashed, and mosh around in a stranger’s dingy house basement while someone screamed into a microphone, and it was great. One time, my brother and I went to a house show in the basement of the American Football house, which was a really shitty venue, but my other friend Max tried to destroy that house’s sewer line by hanging on their bathroom pipes. Max also snuck into several house shows by climbing in throw the windows. One time, at a house show, some dude had a seizure in the middle of the mosh pit, and Kenny had to drag him out to safety. When the guy came to, he slapped Kenny on the back, said thanks, and immediately started moshing again.

House shows were great, and house parties were great, too. I couldn’t tell you how many times I went to someone’s house on the weekend, usually a member of my favorite club, Students for Environmental Concerns (or SECS), and we’d just show up and hang out and drink and talk for hours. There’d usually be like twenty or so people crammed into this tiny, sweaty space, and we’d all just vibe and hang out, turning a club meeting into a proper party. In fact, some of my other best memories with college were SECS events. See, I’ve been an officer in UIUC’s largest and oldest environmental club since my sophomore year, but I’ve been going to events since my freshman year. I’ve been to a couple big proper events, hosted by fancy adult organizations with wealthy donors, where they auction off huge vacations and stuff, and I got wine-drunk at all of them, and one time berated my professor’s brother about the value of loons in lake ecosystems, or something like that. But I couldn’t tell you how many times I also just hung out with people in that club, going to someone’s house to hang out, or meeting up at Murphy’s pub to drink or sing karaoke or just take up as much space as possible. Or one time I hosted a date auction and bar crawl and I raised $500 dollars for our club and then we all got shit-faced at like three different bars. Or that time we went camping…

We did do other things besides party, of course. I’ve hosted so many fucking plant sales now, I’m practically a pro at it. I know how to get the people to buy shit from us. We held a climate strike in the fall of 2019, and got close to a thousand people to show up and protest for a better future. We went on camping trips, where we experienced the local natural area, like kayaking down a river that is still at risk of major pollution, or kayaking around Illinois’s northernmost swamp. We held teach-ins about fossil fuels and why the University of Illinois needs to stop investing millions of dollars into dirty energy that’s guaranteed to one day run out of resources. When I think back to my time at the university, it kind of breaks down into an event that was either affiliated with classes, SECS, or non-SECS friends. But I spent a lot of time doing stuff with SECS, and I am glad to say that I was a part of that organization, and got to meet a ton of amazing people that I hope to stay in touch with into the future. There’s so much more shit I could talk about for SECS, especially because most of my friends were people I met in SECS.

I also met my partner, Cheyenne, through SECS. Am I’m really glad that I did; she’s an amazing woman, and I’m thrilled to say that we’re together. She was even president of SECS for a while, so again, I can tie a ton of my life back to this club. But my life with Cheyenne has gone beyond SECS, too, especially since COVID hit and we had to stop hosting events. I couldn’t tell you how many times her and I and a bunch of our other friends sat in the basement of the English building and “studied” but mostly just fucked around. Or the trips we’ve gone on together since we started dating. In fact, we kind of started dating on my 21st birthday, in 2019, which was one of the most bizarre nights of my life for several reasons that I can’t really share here. But we’ve also gone to the Ozarks together, camped out at a couple different places, gone on trips to Shawnee forest and the Indiana dunes, and just spent time together, happy to be in each other’s company. I’m very happy that I met Cheyenne, and very happy that it was through SECS.

Plus there are so many other friends that I’d love to talk about. Melanie, one of my closest and oldest friends, helped me get through the really rough periods of the early years, and also invited me to mystery murder parties at her house, including one with an incredible twist halfway through. We’d get lunch once a week at this Indian place, Ambar, and I would also get the buffet and eat way too much but it was so damn good. She’s also the person I first got drunk with, and went to my first party on campus with, so there’s that, too. Or Beck, who I will forever thank for making me feel better after an incredibly emotionally-taxing SECS meeting. Or Annamae, who’s really into s o i l s and lichen. Or Edmond, whose porch I once projectile vomited all over. Or Abbi, who helped me run the date auction that made so much money, and also produced an incredible date auction introduction video with me. Or Matt, who was my first friend in SECS and actually got me to stick around with the club. Or Alec, who I’ve now lived with for the past 9 months and is better than me at Punch-Out. Or Genevieve, who lives in our house now and ate all my pizza. Or Maria, one of my newest friend because I haven’t made any other friends since COVID hit, and who’s into backpacking. Or Max, who tried to bring down the pipe. Or Josh. Or Simon. Or Laura. Or Nate. Or Brooke. Or Victoria. Or McCarrick. Or Tyran. Or Shallon. Or Lauren. Or Rachel. Or Harvest House (oh, yeah, I almost forgot I lived in a hippy commune for a year!). Or Dan. Or Leah and Chris. Or Dr. Nesbitt, who is not a student like all these other people, but still someone I’m pretty close to. There are so many people I could talk about, so many stories to share. And so many I have likely forgotten consciously but cannot forget subconsciously. So many people that have been important in my time here at college.

I already talked a bit about COVID, and how it’s put a damper on my last year of college. I feel like I’ve missed out on a lot of stuff, but that hasn’t stopped me from still enjoying the last year or so. It’s just been a much quieter time. Things have been stressful, and time has kind of merged together, without much to differentiate one month from another, but I really don’t mind that much. COVID could have been much worse for me than it was, and I still found ways to enjoy my time and see people. And I can thank Cheyenne for keeping me sane during the heights of the pandemic. And I still did a ton, pre-covid. It’s interesting, I originally imagined this post as being something really sappy and sad about how much I’m going to miss my friends, and how much I’m going to miss college, but really, it hasn’t been that way for me, writing it. Funnily enough, this thing has felt like writing one big list, and it makes me feel really good. It makes me think about how much fun I had in college, despite everything that happened with the virus. I did a lot, and I had a lot of fun, and there’s a lot that I’m forgetting even now.

I spent a lot of time, during freshman and Sophomore year, worrying if I would ever have the “real” college experience that I wanted. I grew up hearing stories from my parents, who were both very involved in a fraternity, about the crazy antics and escapades they and their twenty friends would get up to. And while maybe my experience and college didn’t really fall in line with that ideal, I’d say that I had just as good of an experience in my own right. It may not have looked quite the same, especially near the end, but I made super close friends, fell in love, went to parties and bars, tried those drugs that I wanted to, graduated with a near-perfect GPA, got some real experience with the wider job market, produced some pretty cool writing, learned a ton in different classes, went on trips with those same classes (oh, yeah, I went on a trip to Baraboo, Wisconsin, too, to see Devil’s Lake the International Crane Foundation), went on other trips not through classes, became an integral part of an important environmental club, and just overall had a great time. It was a wonderful four years.

Everyone says that college is supposed to be the best time of your life, but I don’t know if I agree with that, because saying that any one time is the “best time of your life” makes it sound like everything’s downhill from here. But, really, I feel like I’m just starting. The best part of college, for me, was definitely second semester sophomore year to about the beginning of the pandemic, because that’s when I felt the best about myself and everything else, but overall, even the painful first year and the confusing final pandemic-blighted year weren’t too bad. They were, I’d say, pretty good. Much better than high school, anyway. And now that it’s all over, I am sad. I am going to be losing some close friends, and chances to spend time with people that I love, because we’re all going our separate ways. But it also feels like something new is starting. The end of one thing is the beginning of another, and all that. Nowadays, I’d say I’m a pretty optimistic person, so I’m excited. I mean, I’m also a little sad. I’m going to miss the U of I, and I’m going to miss SECS, and I’m going to miss my friends. Like, a lot. But I know we’ll stay in touch.

As someone with a particular brand of OCD that constantly forces me to make reminders, remember everything, and document as much as I possibly can in a vain, fleeting attempt to bulwark myself against the decay of entropy and the inevitability of death and the ravages of time, writing this is a bit difficult for reasons that have nothing to do with missing people. I’m afraid that I’m going to forget something. I’m afraid that I haven’t written enough here. I’m afraid that, in twenty years, I won’t be able to remember everything or everyone I’ve mentioned. And that’s a scary thought, because everything that seems so real and important right now will, in time, become nothing more than distant memories, and someday, nothing more than dust. For all my optimism, that is also the curse of aging and living. And of knowing what the future holds, as far as aging goes. So, I’d like to apologize, if this piece seems rushed, or if you feel left out, or if it doesn’t make a whole lot of sense. It is just a series of memories, at this point, in some sort of a list format. But, at a certain point, I have to learn to accept that I can’t, and don’t have to, remember everything. The important stuff will always be there, hopefully. And this will always be there, too, or at least until I run out of money to pay for site hosting. But I still feel pretty good about it all. I had a great time at college. And while I’m sad that it’s over, and there’s a lot I’m going to miss, I don’t feel sad, in the same way that I feel, well, excited. For something new. Especially as the pandemic, at least in America, seems to be breaking, and things are opening up. It feels a bit like a new day, and I’m ready to move on to new things. And, as always, I’ll keep you updated here, on this goofy-ass website.

So, to everyone I talked about in here, thank you. For everything you’ve done for me in my time here. And to everyone I haven’t mentioned, thank you to you, too. I’m sorry if I burned you, years ago. And I’m sorry if I didn’t have a chance to mention you now. Thank you to UIUC, for the English building, for the YMCA, for Green Street, for Murphy’s pub, for the quad, for the Natural History Building, for the Union, for taking me to Rome, for teaching me about the world, for SECS, for giving me friends, for a shitty cinder-block dorm room, for a chance to fight for what I believe in, for a chance to party and let off some steam, for a chance to test my strengths and succeed beyond my own expectations, and for a chance to fail, too. Thank you to everyone and everything I’ve interacted with over the last four years, for making it a great time. This isn’t everything I could talk about, not by a long shot. I could talk about Riot Fest. Baraboo Wisconsin. SECS officer meetings. Friends of a Feather, a club that I tried to start. Long nights, alone in the dark. And long nights, with friends in the light. Camping trips, hiking trips, swimming trips, walking up and down Green Street with no goal. Hiking the entirety of the Boneyard Creek. The Rantoul airforce base. A limited number of football games, but far more basketball, hockey, volleyball, and wrestling matches. Breaking into Memorial Stadium. Allerton park. The University YMCA, and its rise and fall. Comedy nights at the Clark Bar, and walking down the road to the hospital parking lot. An old observatory. The student farm. Cooking at Harvest House, and heartbreak. I have to cut it off now, or I’ll go on forever. There is much, much more than I can fit into a single several-thousand-word post, but that’s how it is with anyone’s life, I suspect. So thank you to everyone who’s been a part of life, and thank you to letting me reminisce a little bit here. These years have been special. Thank you. And see you all again soon.