The close of another semester always gets me nostalgic. I could have had the most
stressful semester of my life, or the best semester ever, and I would still wish for a do-over.

Granted, not every class period of every day is memorable, but it’s still time spent that we will never get back, and an experience that will never be repeated. Every semester is just one more opportunity to fill our time capsule of academic memories. Often, we don’t realize what an impression a certain instructor, or class has on us until we hear other people talking about that same instructor or class, and then all of a sudden, memories (for better or worse) come flooding our
minds and we can picture the kind of person we were at the time that we took the class.

It’s hard to walk away from the end of the semester without having some thoughts about how it’s gone. Maybe we’re sad because it’s over and it seems like just yesterday we received the syllabi for our respective courses, or maybe the thought of summer and an eventual break from school is the only thing that helped move the semester along.

Whether we are new students, returning students (also known as lifers), or we plan on moving up the collegiate ladder, our time spent at City College is like a book. Sometimes before we come to the end of a book, we might look through the pages and see what we’ve read so far—skimming through pages of the book that lead to the buildup of it’s conclusion before we finish the final chapter. The same could be said for the end of the semester: At some point before we reach finals, we take a look back at what we’ve accomplished throughout the semester, academically and
personally, thinking about our successes and failures— adding it all up to make sense of the past five months. Sometimes we have a premonition of how things will end, and other times, we’re in for a complete surprise.

Whatever our experience has been this past semester, the metaphoric puppy that we started with is now a teenager—spry and confident, ready to take on what’s next. If we feel like we’ve been kicked around like that baby giraffe, the fall has taught us there’s a lesson to be learned, even if we feel like we’re face down on the concrete.

Maybe summer’s a good time to take it easy, plan a trip to the happiest place on earth, go to a concert, introduce The Dictionary Game into your life, or maybe work on adding some new music to the soundtrack of your life. Whatever you do, make it a movie script ending.