Nearly two years ago, I wrote an article about trying to slow down time at Carleton. I had been here for a year, and I was realizing I was almost halfway through college, and it scared me how quickly the time had gone by. I can’t decide whether I like the article or whether I think I was absolutely incorrect. It’s true that we talk about time way too much, that the trimester system breaks years up into tiny pieces so it feels like we’re constantly either at the beginning or end of something or other. But, two years ago I wrote about how we needed to talk about time less, and I don’t agree with that anymore. We may think about it too much, but the larger problem is that we talk about time in the wrong way.

By my sophomore year at Carleton, I started noticing a disconnect between how days and weeks felt. Days feel eternal: by dinner, breakfast feels long forgotten, with mornings and afternoons each representing discrete time units divided by common time on Tuesdays and Thursdays and lunch on other days. But weeks don’t feel that way: sometimes it feels like you put something off by one day on Monday and suddenly it’s Friday and you still need to send that email. 

But, I’ve now been at Carleton for three full years, so instead of talking about days and weeks, I want to talk about years. Specifically, I want to correct one of the most useless pieces of advice that I constantly hear. College is short, and it goes by quickly, and you should savor every moment: that’s the sum of most of the advice I received during my freshman year.

I can’t say that’s wrong. Each term here and each year feels short, but it’s not like they don’t happen. Four years is a really long time. Assuming the average age of a Carleton student is 20, you’ll spend nearly a fifth of your life here. Take a second to think about who you were four years ago. If you’re a freshman, you were probably starting high school. How much have you changed over the last four years? What would high school-you think of you now? If you’re like me and my friends as freshmen, you’ll probably realize that four years ago feels like a long time. 

The terrible part about being a senior that I had never really thought about is you come back to Carleton, and half of the people you know are gone. Freshmen: by the time you’re seniors, no one in the grades above you will still be here. And during freshman year, that doesn’t feel strange: I remember how old upperclassmen, even the sophomores, seemed when I was a freshman. Last week, at the club fair, I had the unfortunate realization that I’m now older than all of the students I looked up to were when I met them. That’s a scary thought. I keep wondering whether they felt more like adults than I do now, and the conclusion I keep coming to is that they probably didn’t. I probably just thought they did because they seemed older.

But that’s the thing, upperclassmen are older. Over four years at Carleton, you learn a lot. A lot of people use college as a time to figure out how to become an adult. When I wrote an article about slowing down time at Carleton, one of the premises was wrong.

I assumed in my article that time passing is bad, that we don’t want to get any older, and that slowing down time is something we should strive towards. And most of the time, I still agree with that. Please, don’t ask seniors what we’re doing after we graduate: it’s just about the most stressful question you can ask. The idea of graduating is scary. And, being a senior is fun, but it’s also sad. On one hand, classes get easier as you get older — no exam will ever be more stressful than my French 103 final, when I had no idea what a college-level final would be. But, you develop a sense of how to study and what to expect and things get easier. But, being a senior means realizing that the people you associate with clubs are gone. I know not to expect the Carletonian leadership of my freshman and sophomore years to be there, but the space still feels emptier without them. Every time I design Bald Spot, I still miss the design editor who designed it my sophomore year.

But, as much as time passing is sad, there are also things to look forward to in college. College gets easier when you get used to being here. Clubs become more fun when the people who have been in a while become the people who joined when you did, who were the people you were once confused with. Classes get more fun when you start to know the people in your major and when you can connect them back to classes you’ve taken before. It’s sad that college goes by so quickly, but somehow, over four years, most of us go from being high school kids to being ready for the adult world. 

If I were to go back in time and give my freshman-self advice, I would say that time passes, but that’s ok. It’s supposed to. Yes, freshman year won’t last forever, but freshman year is also not anyone’s favorite year of college. And maybe who you know will change, maybe you’ll have friends you fall out of touch with or subjects you stop taking classes in, but that’s supposed to happen. You’re not supposed to be a freshman forever; you’re supposed to grow up. 

Growing up makes college strange because it’s easy to look back on a year of college and realize how much time has passed, but it’s harder to look back and notice that you’ve changed. You notice it in little ways: you’ll stop worrying about finding your classes on the first day, exams will become less stressful, you’ll realize you’ve been friends with people for years and they understand you. Maybe other freshmen in my year knew what made them happy by the end of freshman year, but in many ways, I didn’t. It took me time to learn to prioritize sleep, and to take classes with professors I liked. It took me time to settle into a routine that made me happy. It took me time to start noticing the small moments in college and how much they matter. It took me time to reach a point where I could look back and realize I’ve changed since I started college.

I don’t like the idea of time passing. I find it sad. I think the idea of things changing is scary and can’t possibly be good. But I’m also starting to realize that time passing has its benefits, too. College gets better when you spend more time here. Friendships get easier when you’ve known people longer. Time passing represents changes that seem scary, but it also represents changes that you’ll like. I stand by what I wrote two years ago: you shouldn’t spend all of the term thinking about how soon it’ll be ending. But, when you do inevitably start thinking that, it’s good to remember that the end of term doesn’t have to be bad.