Graduation 2023

Going back on the record / of my life since 2019, / examining the transcripts and / videos, I imagine / tracing my silhouette, to see / where I end and the rest / of the world begins.

Life is, at its core, the process of you making yourself. So college, a four-year rung on this ladder, is only a small step forward.

As I sit down to write this, though, none of those drafts feel right. There’s so much to say yet also nothing at all. How do you encapsulate four years of your life in 850 cohesive words?

Now, as a senior, my bittersweet reflection on the past four years has reminded me, yet again, how lucky I am that my life has led here, in part by years of dedication and hard work, in part by sheer dumb luck.

When I look back at my college experience, it’s the smaller activities I remember. I was enjoying talking with my friends; making a sweater on the Glade; baking a cake with my roommate for no other reason than I wanted to eat some cake. I was enjoying my life.

My time at UC Berkeley has been a collection of miniscule moments memorialized in my mind like artifacts in a museum. What I have experienced certainly has not been banal; yet, my mind is enraptured by the beauty of the blanks between events that have altered the course of my life. 

My issues are my own, and I am very sparing in who I let in. But I couldn’t let this opportunity pass without reflecting on the past four years and the incredible people who got me here.

As I’m getting ready to say goodbye, it’s difficult to believe that the girl who walked through Sather Gate for the first time four years ago is the same person seeing it for perhaps the very last time now.

People say college offers your first taste of independence — the hallmark of modern adulthood — but as a graduating senior, I’ve never felt more interdependent.