Many students go through it: slogging through the last few classes of their college career before jumping into a full-time job or life outside university.
Senioritis, as it’s called, affects many junior and senior students who can see the finish line.
“I’m very nervous because [I’m graduating] sooner than I planned on. But I’m also very excited,” senior Mass Communications student Justin Platt said. “I think the idea of being 21 and graduating is pretty cool because I’m eager to get started in my career.”
Platt has had to manage his time between class and extracurriculars. He works both for CMU-TV and the campus radio station KMSA. He’s set to graduate at the end of this semester in just a few weeks.
“I think time management is one of the most important things you can work on,” Platt said. “That goes along with even scheduling classes, I’d schedule myself the classes that I wasn’t particularly excited about, but I’d always give myself one or two classes per semester that I was excited about.”
Besides time management, Platt also advises to avoid cheating or cutting corners. He cheated his way through high school Japanese for years, and said every test was so much more stressful because he was trying to not be caught.
“I would say don’t cheat because even if you can get away with it, it sets you up for failure in the future because you start skipping out on steps and you start giving less effort,” Platt said.
Platt will be one of the many Mavericks graduating this winter, with commencement on Dec. 17.
“Sometimes in my downtime, I just want to graduate already. But for the most part, I’m too busy with the campus magazine and job to be thinking about that,” fifth-year Graphic Design senior Esme Contreras said.
Contreras describes herself as a perfectionist and said it’s been frustrating learning how to deal with that as her school experience has progressed.
“In terms of getting through school, it’s writing down everything that I need to do in the week, and then scheduling them for a specific amount of work time per day. So if I have 16 things to do during the week and I have a four day week, I would make sure I could do four things a day,” Contreras said about managing her schedule.
She’s looking for a career in graphic design, and right now specializes in logo design.
“I think it’ll be a good difference,” Contreras said of moving to a career from school. “Not bad but different, like a good difference because we won’t have to be dealing with homework and having to balance a job. Having to be stressed out about making homework deadlines. I think with this, it’ll just be focusing completely on my job. I think it’ll be a nice change of pace from the past.”
Contreras graduates in the Spring of 2022.
“It’s hard because I’m now working a 40 hour job in my field, and then I have just two classes to catch up on before I graduate,” fifth-year Counseling Psychology student Zoey Tomlinson said. “It’s hard to make myself go to the class or put in as much effort as I did beforehand, because I don’t see it as much value as the actual on-site experience.”
Tomlinson has been attending CMU for a few years now, after getting an associate’s degree in Psychology at Front Range Community College. Going to graduate school in Fall 2022, she’s hoping to get a doctorate in Psychology. Although she said she’s struggled with senioritis this semester, it wasn’t a problem last semester.
“I’d say for senioritis in general, at least what’s worked for me, is giving myself a little bit of grace and letting myself not do as well, and procrastinate a little bit more,” Tomlinsons said. “Just not expecting perfection, especially when you’re at the end of something and it gets really hard.”
Tomlinson is graduating from CMU in a few weeks before planning to take a semester off and work full-time.
