In each installment of “Senior Scaries,” Erin Ye ’26 confronts the senior-year fears of her final quarters at Stanford. You’ll hear about the triumphs and tribulations of tackling the Senior Bucket List™ and hopefully feel less alone in the never-ending soul search that comes with growing up.
As I return to Stanford for winter quarter, it occurs to me that the next time I go home, I’ll be going to “my parents’ house” before moving into “my apartment” in New York City. The thought is sickening.
When I graduated from high school, my biggest fear was that I would never see my friends again. I was going to California, and they were staying on the East Coast; I started school a month after them and would end school a month after them, too. Our previously shared schedule of over 10 years was dead and buried, and I was worried that with it, so were our friendships.
Thankfully, that hasn’t been true. I still talk to my closest friends from home all the time in our very active group chats. Over breaks, we make a point to keep up our traditions, like hosting Friendsgiving and eating grapes under the table on New Year’s Eve (going on three years in a row, none of us have boyfriends, so the TikTok superstition might not work, but it still makes for excellent home video footage). The same girls I used to cry over AP exams and prom dates with are the ones I now talk to about Roth IRAs and grad school applications. We’ve all changed, but there’s something about shared history that makes it feel like we’ll never really outgrow each other.
It’s not the same as before, but in some ways it’s better: there’s more stories to share, more people to invite into the folds of our lives. I’ve been lucky enough to meet the college friends of my high school friends, and it’s cool to see how the people we love are shaped by other people who love them.
Six months out from college graduation, my biggest fear is, once more, never seeing my friends again. This time, the challenges feel greater: my college friends don’t have a shared hometown that we return to during breaks, and in the real world, breaks are far less frequent and standardized. Sure, a lot of people will be in New York, and sure, it will be fun to explore other cities using my PTO, but it is certainly not the same as waking up every day knowing that I’ll eat my meals and study with friends, that they’re always within walking distance.
The cynical part of me says that growing up means accepting distance from people who used to be central to your life. We’re all going to get older and meet new people; we’ll get married and our weddings will be like college reunions for the next 10 to 15 years. We’ll start families and our kids will be “family friends” who see each other every now and then if we’re lucky. Some friends might just be people we tell stories about, people we “knew in college” but haven’t seen since. As priorities shift and as we age, the idea of friendship becomes less tied to time commitment and more to the abstract feeling of affection toward someone, regardless of how often you see them. I don’t think the world will turn upside down the moment I graduate, but sometimes that’s how it feels, and I don’t know if I’m ready.
The summer after I graduated from high school was the best summer of my life. Free from academic anxiety, my friends and I spent every waking moment together. My days consisted of beach lounging, countless trips to the frozen yogurt store, night swimming in Mary Grace’s pool and weekend brunches at Munday’s diner. I quit my job at Rite Aid, hugged everybody tight at grad parties and promised myself I wouldn’t blink. I think it was the anxiety of limited hours, knowing that the first person to leave for college was leaving in X amount of days, that made us treat every moment like the last. I’ll always look back on that time fondly and remember how it felt to be 17 with the whole world at my fingertips.
I think I ought to treat the next two quarters in the same way. There’s a million things I’ve been meaning to get to on my bucket list but haven’t yet, from hiking in the Pinnacles to playing trivia at the Rose and Crown. There’s no more time to say, “We can do it next quarter.” In fact, there is no next quarter. The time is now.
I’ll miss the “nothing moments” of going with a friend to run an errand or sitting together in joint laziness. That just means I’ll have to do more of that while I can. Change is scary, but I’ll see my friends again —maybe not as often, but each time will feel more precious, so that the substance of our relationships, though different in composition, are always filled with meaning.