This is the thing I wrote at the bottom of the actual to-do-list that I have tacked up on my wall. I wrote down “get good grades” and underneath I wrote a caveat for one of my classes that I feel like I haven’t done so well in. When I noticed that, I crossed it out, and wrote “NO NEGATIVITY” in capital letters at the bottom.

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The semester seems to have moved faster than usual. As I’m sitting in the airport, headed for home, writing this, and despite the gray clouds covering the sky and finals being over, it still feels like it should be September. So much has happened, these last few months, and it still seems absurd that in less than eight hours I will be home.

Here are a few of the things I’ve learned this semester:

1. Resist the urge to just do the bare minimum. It’s easy to skim over readings, take half-hearted notes. It doesn’t matter if the professor is wonderful or terrible, you’ll get less out of the class if you don’t put in the effort. Thinking critically will allow you to evaluate the world in a different light. It will enable you to think of other people complexly.
2. Write down funny quotes that your friends say. Maybe add context, for later purposes. But you’ll look back at those quotes and be reminded of the moment and that is important.
3. You should go watch school sports. This was a strange one for me, because I don’t particularly dislike sports, in fact I rather enjoy watching both soccer and basketball. Much to my own surprise, I manage to get wrapped up in the game, in the way the players interact with each other. Still, until this semester I somehow managed to not go to a single sporting event. (I know, I know.) I suppose I’m just saying: try something new. Something that you aren’t sure whether or not you’ll like. Maybe you’ll be surprised.
4. Pretzels dipped in Nutella is delicious.
5. Don’t be afraid of being honest, of being blunt. People have a way of dancing around the truth and never really saying what they want to say. Don’t do that. Don’t be afraid of what other people will think, let them know what you’re thinking.
6. Sometimes the timing just isn’t right.
7. Space out your dinning dollars, but know that if you get to the end of the semester and have none, your friends with extra will be more than happy to buy you food.
8. Go on walks. Tacoma is truly beautiful. Go look at the houses, at the Little Lending Library’s scattered across the streets, at the Sound.
9. Give your friend’s hugs.
10. Talk to new people. They’re nice. You’ll probably have something in common with them. Make an effort to make new friends, they’ll help you gain a different perspective on college.
11. Don’t forget about your old friends, though. Make them know they’re important.
12. Get off campus. Walk to the Met, explore Seattle, go to Frisko Freeze late at night in your pajamas, and wander around Point Defiance.
13. Read The Opposite of Loneliness by Marina Keegan; “Some Extensions on the Sovereignty of Science” by Alberto Rios; On Writing by Stephen King; and The Sheltering Desert by Henno Martin.
14. Remember that it’s the little things that don’t seem important that matter the most. Those stupid moments, those times when you’re just laughing, eating breakfast with friends. Those moments are the foundations to a friendship.
15. Cry when you need to cry. And don’t be afraid of crying in front of other people. Your friends care about you, they want to help you. They want you to feel better as much as you want to feel better.
16. Let yourself have lip synch battles with your friends, even if you’re in a semi-public place. Also: improv rap battles.
17. Don’t put off things until the last minute and get a good night’s sleep. Especially before tests.
18. Email your teachers from high school. I read this poem in high school and I could only remember a few lines (“My student wrote star smoke, star love, star cape… / into poem after poem and told me once that her father / never said he loved her”) and pointlessly spent hours attempted to google the lines to figure it out. Eventually, I decided to email my high school English teacher, as I read the poem in her Creative Writing class junior year. She wonderfully emailed me back the poem and asked me how school was going. Don’t loose those connections.
19. Have weird conversations, have deep conversations.
20. Know that you don’t know everything. You’ll never know everything. And that’s okay.

Today was my last day at UPS. It kind of snuck up on me. It was a bit like going down a water slide. You’re just lying back looking at the ceiling, when suddenly it occurs to you that you’d better hold your breath because you’re about to be shot out into the pool. I don’t know what future holds for me. I may end up in graduate school (fingers crossed). I may end up with writing or editing job. Or I may end up working at Starbucks or some similar place while I figure out what to do next. I don’t know. The good thing is that I’ve scheduled at least an hour a day to panic about it.

But for now I’m happily ensconced in my favorite armchair with a cup of tea and a book. This is the life. To all of you who are still working hard on finals, just hang in there. The end will come and soon you will be in your own favorite armchairs. In meantime, I’d like to reflect on some of the crazier things I did in college. Normally I’m not a wild sort of person. I start every morning with a scone and a cup of tea. But I did get to do some crazy stuff in college and I’d like to share it with you.

1.) Driving in down town Tacoma when it was flooding. We had gone on a dessert run to Hello Cupcake even though it was storming out. The rain was coming down in sheets and I had to get us back by three o’clock otherwise we’d be charged extra for the Zipcar. I didn’t know the roads and some of them were too flooded to use anyway. A lot of swearing was involved, but in the end we made it. I earned those cupcakes.

2.) Rock climbing in vantage. In my junior year, I went on a PSO trip to vantage. It was my first time ever rock climbing and the group decided to do a night climb. I climbed partway and then I realized how high it was. I remember thinking to myself “beep you Eleanor Roosevelt” halfway up the rock face. When I was a child my parents gave me a magnet with an Eleanor Roosevelt quote on it, “everyday do one thing that scares you.” Well, this was scaring me all right.

3.) Taking four and a half units my second semester of junior year along with an internship and a thesis. Don’t ever do this. It’s exhausting and by the end of it you will want to punch something, either that or go cry in a corner.

I realize that to most of you these don’t sound that crazy. But I don’t like loud parties, drunk people, or risk of serious physical harm so these are my options. That’s okay though, I stretched myself and I’m really more of an armchair and tea person anyway. Except when I go out to hit the football post (I use it like a heavy bag)—but that’s another story.

I am graduating at the end of this semester. In ten days, two hundred and forty hours, 14400 minutes, and 864000 seconds I will no longer be a college student. Because you are probably reading this at least a couple of days after I wrote it even more time will have gone by. This past couple of weeks has felt like the beginning of a roller coaster when the car is slowly rising and you know that in any minute it will plunge down. But before I leave UPS for good I want to acknowledge some of the people that made my experience here special: my friends. Every college student needs them. If only to have someone they can borrow meal points off of. I am going to make a list here of things my friends have done for me this semester that I am grateful for.

• Providing chocolate. I have been mooching chocolate off of one of my friends since sophomore year. When she asks me if I want any, I reply: “Is the pope catholic?” And then I start salivating.
• Exchanging cat stories. I am a cat person. And by cat person, I mean a person who will let their cat wake them up at four in the morning because it wants to be petted. I get together with my friends and coo over how our cats are all such spoiled princesses. This lets all the cat adoration out of my system and keeps the strange looks I get to a minimum.
• Sharing perspectives that are different than my own. If the world was homogenous, we would all be very bored. In college I learned that, thankfully, it isn’t.
• Giving me a robe when I get shut out of my room in a towel. This Thursday I locked my keys in my room while I was in the shower. I had work at the diner in twenty minutes. As you probably know, the diner uniform is not a purple bath towel. When I told my family about this episode they thought it was very funny for some reason. Hopefully not schadenfreude.
• Watching Netflix with me on the weekends. This has given me a reason to leave my room and prevented me from turning into a cave person. A cave person can write an elegant fifteen page paper but speaks only in grunts.
• Friends are the people you can reveal vulnerability too. When I revealed some of mine, one of my friends said that she was honored that I’d chosen to confide in her. I was very touched.

I hope that whomever’s reading this, you have friends as nice as mine.