OPINION: Why does this year suck?

By Hannah Lennon

I don’t know about you guys, but I am seriously struggling this year. It’s almost as if all of my professors met up and devised a secret plan to make my senior year certifiably terrible. I’ve never had this much work, everything is due at the same time, and no professors seem to care that we’re drowning. What is up with that? I’m not dumb, I know it could be that it’s my senior year and I’m taking my capstone course so of course, I have more work. It could be that this is the first time in a year and a half that everything on campus is back with full force and it’s just overwhelming me. Or--and this is my favorite way to look at it-- Mercury is in retrograde and the universe hates me right now. But, the thing is, it’s not just me. I’ve talked to friends, classmates, and teammates, and they’ve all said the same thing: this year we feel overloaded.

I never ask for extensions, and I had to ask for one at the beginning of the semester. In the meeting I had with my professor about it, she told me that senior year was often overwhelming to students and I just needed to give it time to settle and maybe even try a new way of managing my time. Well, it’s almost mid-semester; I’ve already gotten the assignments for two midterms and I’ve turned one of them in, and nothing has settled. If anything, everything’s getting worse. I can’t wait for the sweet release of Fall Break; it may only be one three-day weekend and I’ll probably regret not using the extra day off to get ahead on work, but I’ll take what I can get right now.

September has been a dumpster fire of stress, assignments, work, and practice. I haven’t even had time to have a properly fun weekend yet, isn’t that awful? What kind of senior hasn’t been to Brother Mike’s or Brack’s yet? My mom would probably commend me for staying in, especially during a pandemic, but I can only rewatch Gilmore Girls and Marvel movies so many times before I want to do something more. That’s all the free time I seem to have, one or two hours at the end of every week, no more, and sometimes even less. And the reason I’m turning to my comfort movies and TV shows in the first place is because I feel so lost in reality. Rory Gilmore and Steve Rogers are a good buffer for me, their lawful-goodness wraps me up in a burrito of safety while I watch. And when the credits roll, I have two options: watch another and feel another temporary wave of calm, or snap back to the world outside my dorm room that’s full of due dates and commitments.

It’s not that I don’t want to do the things I’m doing. To the contrary, I love everything I do on campus. This semester I have room to take elective classes; being in Student Government has been a huge part of my time at Stonehill and I can’t give that part of me up; the only thing that could stop me from writing for The Summit is losing my hands, and even then I could always dictate my stories; working at the Sports Complex is a fun and easy job; and being Co-Captain of the Varsity Equestrian Team is what I’ve been looking forward to since freshman year. I can’t be at Stonehill without my commitments because they’re not just extracurriculars, they’re parts of my identity.

I don’t know what it is about this year. Senior year is supposed to be one for the history books; I want to look back on it like the Roaring Twenties, not the Great Depression. So, why does this year suck? I really don’t know, but at least most of us feel the same way about it, and maybe we’ll be able to convince a professor or two to ease up on the workload. Just like no one knows why the year is off to a terrible start, we also don’t know how it’ll end. I’m trying to keep my head up as I muddle through, and I hope you do too.