With graduation looming ever closer, I find myself reminiscing about my college beginnings. I can’t seem to stop myself from thinking back to those days when college was still an utterly novel concept: alien, mysterious and exciting — a voyage into the unknown. And I know I’m not alone in this feeling; all over Cornell, seniors are succumbing to this epidemic of premature nostalgia.

Just the other day, some of my friends and I were discussing what our expectations of college were when we were still seniors in high school. A common theme was that going to college provided an opportunity to recreate oneself and leave behind unwanted portions of persona in the pages of high school yearbooks.