Miscellany

Are you a senior and wondering what you’ve been missing?

Are you an underclasswoman who’s looking to the future?

This quick and easy guide will tell you all you need to know about being a true Wellesley woman and making the months between Convocation and Commencement as fun-filled and sleepless as possible.

1) Write a Thesis / Take a 350.
Sounds great at first, right? "I can study whatever I want and get credit for it!" Just find a way to make it fit into your major, and you could do that research on anything under the sun. Write your Sociology thesis on "the imagined interaction between fan and celebrity" and read fan-fiction for honors course credit. Do an English independent study on the author you’ve been obsessed with since high school and re-read all your favorite novels for the seventeenth time. Create a computer science project on high-speed graphic rendering – play PlayStation games and learn about how they work. Who wouldn't want to do that? Plus, think about all of the other perks... your own carrel in the library; permission to check out books for months on end; that little touch of moral superiority that you get from being a "thesis student" while those "slackers" in your "graduating class" take three "credits", at least two of which that frequently come up on Opinions-Classes when someone asks "What's an easy fifth class?"

But then you reach the middle of February and you realize that you have to actually churn out 50 to 100 pages of well-written, informed, scholarly prose – panic starts to set in. Underclasswomen, this is why you never, ever, ever ask a senior about her thesis. At least not without a good running start.

2) Pursue Extracurricular Activities.
September (or worse, January) rolls around. You realize that you're graduating in a few short months, yet you've never played rugby or been in a play or joined Yanvalou or been on House Council or "tea-d" a society. Or you've been involved with the TSA since you first stepped on to campus, and now's your chance to take over the reins of power and really make all those changes that you've been thinking of for years, to transform the organization into everything you've always thought it could be. Maybe all this sounds like a good idea in August – but then you realize that you're now spending most of your evenings in rehearsals, exec board meetings and practices. All that time that you could have been spending perfecting your pool game, finding the best café in the Boston area, or working in the Science Center has been sharply curtailed.

3) Do Recruiting / Apply to Graduate School
Did you know that after you graduate, you don't get to stay at Wellesley? You're out there in that "real world" place that people invoke on Community as if it were the Promised Land. And if your parents are like mine, they told you five years ago "Four years, and then you're off." You know what that means? You've got to devote hours and hours to such draining tasks as buying résumé paper, shining up your résumé, writing cover letters, reading six thousand job postings, attending endless CWS workshops (unless you’re a science major who wants to stay in the sciences. Then maybe you should just talk to your department) and shopping for the perfect interview suit that makes you look like a competent version of Ally McBeal.

On the other hand, you might be looking to continue in the realm of academia, especially if you've looked at the recent job market. So while you get to skip the CWS part, you still have to look at your transcript; figure out good excuses for the things you've messed up on; take GREs and other tests with unpronounceable acronyms; look for a university where you can sell yourself to a faculty member and still keep your brain intact; comb through your departments for faculty members who love you or at least seem to think you're fairly smart so that you can get recommendations, and do yet another series of essays. I bet you thought that you'd gotten this all out of your life four years ago, right?

Let's not forget that when you've actually managed to do all this and you've found a reason for living after May 31, you get to enter the world of apartment-hunting, looking for roommates, and just surviving without a dining hall, a wonderful maintenance staff and pre-paid electric and water bills.

4) Have a social life
This is the last year you'll get to spend with your Wellesley pals – your friends from your floor first year, that really cool girl you met trying to finish up a final paper in the LTC, all the people you've been going to parties and concerts and out to play with for the past four years. After this, you're going to be all over the place, you'll never see each other again, and so it's your obligation to spend as much time with these people as humanly possible. Plus, you're finally all back from being abroad and all of legal drinking age! You've got to live it up now, before you’re working 50 hours a week and wondering how you ever thought that 8:30 AM was early.

5) Work
This one winds up being kind of crucial to the previous steps. Plus in addition to needing money for weekends spent exploring the bars of Allston, you need to start thinking about how you're going to cover rent for next year, how you're going to pay for Senior Week and class rings and the 6,000 Wellesley-emblazoned items that you're going to wind up purchasing in a mid-May fit of pre-emptive nostalgia, and worst of all how to pay off the loans that you had to take out to get through here. Also, you must have some sort of employment experience because you'll have to show when you walk out with your diploma in one hand and your résumé in the other that, in addition to a bewildering grasp of 19th century French literature or South Asian history or sex and sexuality as portrayed in the American media, you have skills which will pay the aforementioned rent. Consider playing up your typing, filing, and photocopying.

6) Have a relationship
Yeah, technically this one's optional. But if you're in one, you've got to work out how to keep it going with all of the above. If it's long-distance, then you'll have to add traveling to see each other to the time you're spending on job interviews or graduate school visits and every adventure you're having with your Wellesley friends. If you're just starting one, you're probably not even thinking about all of the things you put off so you can be starry-eyed and infatuated... until you realize that you have a major paper due the next morning. And if you're not in one, then you're probably trying to find your final hedonistic undergraduate fling, especially when Rolling Stone keeps telling you that everyone else is doing it all the time.

7) Take classes
This, too. Don't forget about the classes and professors that everyone on Opinions/Classes says you have to experience before you graduate, and how you've somehow managed to be here for four years without ever taking a class in Jewett. Or how you went to an open house in the Observatory with a friend last spring and you really, really want to see what astronomy's like before it's too late. Oh, and did you check out your Degree Compliance report? Have you fulfilled your distribution requirements? And the ones for your major? Or the second major you picked up after realizing that you're only three units away, anyway? Also, make sure you've got that multicultural form in and your PE done. Tragically, they don't stop assigning work just because you're out of here in May.