A Year in Review

By Noah Gist ‘20 Counseling Center Intern

I was prepared for this year to be tough. It’s senior year, we’re all set to wrap up our schooling here and take it out to the world to get further degrees or jobs and get our lives started. One last year to spend with our professors and friends we’ve made over the years here, and one last Dolphy Day to share with everyone. It was a lot to mentally prep for, and it’s hard to say if I would ever really be truly ready for it. Having that all robbed from me and the entire senior class has been a tricky road to navigate. There are days when I’m glad to spend extra time with my parents, my sister, and my dog, to chat with friends online like I did in high school, and taking things nice and slow. There are also days when I’m sad or even angry that those last stressful couple of days before spring break were my last days at Le Moyne and I or any of my friends didn’t even know it. Those days are tough, and it’s hard to shake it off by saying “this’ll pass” because we don’t really get a do-over. We have to make do with the hand we’ve been dealt, and that’s a hard pill to swallow for a lot of people. My heart goes out to all of the first year students, as I can only imagine how stressful and strange this situation must be. Not only to have to adjust to college life and new friends and professors, but to so quickly transition back to what could almost feel like high school again must be challenging. Our second and third year students will hopefully have a fun little bullet point in their years in college when everything shut down for a while before things got back on track, and I look forward to when I can look back a little more fondly and put this behind me. It’s hard to reconcile that there may be people that I’ll never see again that I never had the proper chance to say goodbye to, but I suppose that’s a part of life like everything else. If nothing else, I’m so immensely proud of the Le Moyne community for sticking through this. The professors I’ve had have been nothing but supportive and wonderful, and my friends and fellow students have still kept their passion and strength through all of this, and I consider myself lucky to count them all as friends. If we chatted while I was awkwardly standing by the caf during Healthy Mondays, thank you. If you’re reading this, thank you. If you’re a student, thank you. If you’re a professor, thank you. It’s hard not to overstate how wonderful I think these past four years at Le Moyne have been for me and my friends, and while it’s going to be difficult, I can happily say I’m looking forward to the years to come. For the students returning to Le Moyne next semester, stay strong, and stay together. You got this.