Fuck classes: the biggest thing I learned this quarter is that when you’re a graduating senior everyone will ask you the same two questions. First, this – “I’m sure you get this all the time – but I gotta ask anyway. What are you doing after school?” (I personally think people feel comforted by the answer: “I have no idea.”) Then, this – “What was your all-time highlight of college?” Number two has been hard for me to answer coherently. I keep saying the best part of my Northwestern experience has been how terrible of a fit Northwestern was for me, which makes it sound like an unintentional crop-top, which is perfect, because my clothes don’t fit in here. My appearance issues don’t stop at clothes, either; I have also never been able to properly format a résumé, or check my LinkedIn more than once a month, or garner over 130 likes on a profile picture. I have never even led a club at Northwestern, not a “real” bona fide professional stepping-stone club.

Yet in three weeks, I will graduate the twelfth best school in the country, according to U.S. News and World Report. I will leave with enough degrees and pre-professional shit to dec out a resume. Some people have more stuff on their resume than I do, but that’s okay, because I chose to spend my four years and $200,000 on making the most of the people here. In the time I could have spent vying for executive positions or writing a thesis, I was instead immersing myself in the Oz of Northwestern, a magical land where everything is technicolor, no one ever sleeps, and the land is full of the brightest, craziest and most varied individuals I've ever met. I played in bands; I hung out with journalists and physicists and activists and COOP residents; I lived with FUP counselors and PWild counselors and sorority women. I spent this year living like a playwright, teaching, writing and studying alongside people I now love but never would’ve otherwise met. Most importantly, I found friends outside of formal settings and networks, in the unplanned gaps between classes and extracurriculars and exams, climbing trees on the lakefill, dancing to WNUR music at Streetbeat parties and drinking juice at the Whole Foods free sample counter.

Perhaps my biggest beef with Northwestern's culture is how weird I felt making friends this way. Sometimes communities here feel so entrenched I wonder whether we’ve regressed back to the days of tribal turf wars, if Slivka might set fire to the hoodies of Sit & Spin productions members who might club Zeta Beta Tau fraternity brothers over their heads. “[We pull] these tiny circles… around ourselves,” wrote the late Yale senior Marina Keegan. To me, these circles have always felt vaguely like choke collars: I have fought tooth and nail to forge a more organic network. It is unmappable on Facebook or LinkedIn, and it doesn't have a name. Its undefinability is its greatest strength. And that’s why I say the best part of Northwestern is the ill fit, because it taught me how to stretch the preexisting boundaries and in the process, stretch myself.

At Northwestern, students aspiring toward self-actualization and individuality are constantly at war with CareerCat. I am no exception. I remember the day I called up my mom hyperventilating because I had not heard back from the position for which I’d applied two days before. I remember the day my friend told me she'd applied for forty internships over three days. Forty! I remember my friends bemoaning Northwestern students’ apathy towards social justice issues – and failing to do anything beyond moan (I count myself among this vast majority). I remember the day I attended a campus sit-in, resolved to Act!, god damnit!, and I remember the next day I didn't follow through because I wanted to get a good grade on a paper in a class I didn’t even care about. During my sophomore year, a friend called me at 2 a.m. on a Tuesday morning, sobbing and swearing that his entire identity had been ripped from him because he hadn’t gotten a Dance Marathon co-chair position. AGH!! I wanted to reach through my phone and shake him by the shoulders. DUDE! You were a cool person BEFORE you got involved in Dance Marathon, I promise! I weep for the kids who quit singing because they got rejected by all the a cappella groups. Why should an a cappella group dictate what you do with your lungs?! We let the “yeses” and “nos” we get here prune us like bonsai trees, to our communal detriment.

If I have learned one thing studying writing, it's that my attempts to articulate things will always fall short. And the things I want to articulate about people have been hardest of all, because I do not want to remember my friends by the clubs they chaired, or by the disciplines they studied, or the accolades they earned; I want to remember and record the unimportant things we did, the social blunders we winced through and survived, the drunk-night//hungover-brunch Cheesie’s Double Feature I shared with my friend two weeks ago, the first time I talked with somebody until 5 in the morning and didn’t notice until the birds started going off.

I don’t want to remember my friends by the things Northwestern will remember them for. Northwestern will take care of that. Hopefully the career stuff too; I’m not a leader of a club, I can’t help you network. Anyway, we’re all 22 and clueless, it’s supposed to be hard, we trade our tears for wisdom and it will reward us richly when we’re old. What I wish I could give to each of my fellow graduating seniors – a big back massage. Also, a small voice murmuring: you will be fine, you will be fine, you will be fine.