An End

Last September, I closed an essay in this space with a sobering reminder to seniors. No matter what we do, I wrote, we're leaving Harvard in nine months. Three months and a dozen magazines later, the June 10 graduation date looms even closer. And with graduate school applications coming due, theses pressing and job interviews awaiting, things are only getting more hectic, and more frightening. It's all pretty suffocating stuff, and Serious Harvard provides little help in aleviating the stress. Our only recourse, it seems, is our friends. When we struggle with the very idea of ourselves and what the hell we're doing next year, when we work ourselves into a frenzy over our theses (which are going nowhere), when we very nearly go crazy, our friends are the only ones who can really empathize. They are, after all, facing graduation too.

This is the last issue of 15 Minutes that Phil Rubin and I will edit. Today, as we hand the mag over to the next generation of editors, my feelings are mixed. I'll finally have time to work on my thesis, and I won't have to spend the night at 14 Plympton St. every Tuesday. But I will miss the mag, the paper and the people. And the end of my Crimson tenure makes contemplation of the End--the end of college--a lot harder to avoid. We have only six months to go.