While spending my final summer as a college student in the four-shower-a-day heat of North Carolina with my good friend Graham Zimmerman, I can’t begin to describe how often we dreamt up the immaculate vision of what our senior year was going to be like. Living in Fairlawn apartments, we would be escaping the dorms and Lowry for the first time. To an outsider, our conversations may very well have been mistaken for a show on TLC, as we intricately sketched out a blueprint for our new pad. A bottomless bucket-list was formulated, with new activities and witty ideas thrown in daily. After all, we would be living on the golf course. Amidst our cruises on the back roads outside Chapel Hill with the windows down, music turned up and the fresh Carolina air gliding over our outstretched arms, our anticipation could not have been greater. However, lurking under all this excitement was the latent feeling that, yes, it was going to be our last year of college.

And although these memories linger in my mind like they were just yesterday, we have certainly all come a long way since last summer. In retrospect, we probably didn’t accomplish one-fourth of the endeavors that we aspired to achieve while planning our epic goodbye to Wooster. But does that really matter? With just a week left in my college career, I admit there are things I look back upon with a minimal sense of fatal contrition, albeit more so things I did not do rather than what I did. But when I really mull over my experience at Wooster, the feeling that strikes me most is one of abiding optimism. My focus this week rests not in those I did not do, but in what I have accomplished, the relationships I have been a part of ó whether in depth or in passing ó and the communal adventure we all experienced.

Many students talk of the infamous “Wooster Bubble” with the one-sided negative connotation of its infallible ability to suck students in and never allow them to escape. For those of you who know me, it should not surprise you when I pronounce this description as erroneous. In my opinion, the bubble is dialectic. It can allow for the best possible campus experience that one can have at Wooster, while at the same time it can open your world to new ideas, places and people. My advice is to appreciate this so called “bubble” just as much as you strive to break away from it. Sooner or later, you won’t have it to fall back on. With this said, the most important thing I have learned at Wooster is that there is always more to learn.

As for my final words, I refrain from a critique of the shortcomings of where I think the campus can improve. This is because, overall, my experience at Wooster has been an immensely positive one. And as graduation quickly approaches, my emotions are mixed, to say the least. Perhaps putting it best would be to say that, with no offense intended to the first-years, but man, sometimes you all make me feel old. And on that note, it’s been real, Wooster, it’s been real. Go Scots. Four.