Senior Year, Take II

It really was not so long ago that I was sitting in the SMIC MHS auditorium with my compatriots in the graduating class of 2014, staring blankly at the tassel draped over my head as distant commencement addresses thudded dully against my eardrums. I remember feeling an almost overwhelming mixture of emotions that day, faced with the prospect of being done with SMIC – a school I’d attended since third grade. Nostalgia, trepidation, excitement, relief, fear, sadness, pride, and a near-morbid sense of finality occupied my heart then, and now, after a whirlwind of a stint in college, I find myself again preparing myself for graduation (just one semester away).

When people ask how my senior year has been for its first semester, I have to pause to think. In many ways, it’s been like any other semester in terms of what’s occupied my time, albeit with a few unexpected twists. For one thing, my IM team made it to volleyball season playoffs this time, and for another, I was able to conduct my own music in concert for the first time. I also had the decidedly nontrivial task of applying to graduate schools for further studies. I opted for schools offering a more interdisciplinary approach to graduate degrees after discovering a surprising number of research-based, music/technology opportunities that would allow me to synthesize my two majors (physics and music) in earnest. The application process did feel discernibly different from college apps, feeling more like applying to apprenticeships instead, given the programs’ high levels of specificity. It was nonetheless harrowing, inspiring in me the same mixture of inadequacy and ambition that applying to colleges had.

Classes in particular became stranger this year than ever before, among the strangest being my class on Jewish music. My professor was Francesco Spagnoloacht (‘French Spanish,’ he translated for us from Italian), the curator of the Magnes Collection at Berkeley (a prominent museum for Jewish studies). He had been able to invite Victoria Hanna, a professional Israeli singer (or ‘vocal artist,’ as she preferred), to take up temporary residence at the museum for the semester and produce musical works based on the collection’s selection of Jewish amulets. Swiftly, I was conscripted by her to be her personal pianist and percussionist, and ended up accompanying her to concert after concert as I was constantly given new music to play. “Maybe we try this?” she would say innocently, as she sent me a recording I knew I was expected to learn by ear within two days for performance. It was a singularly bizarre, thoroughly tiring, and surprisingly delightful experience from top to bottom (incidentally a perfect descriptor for the college environment as a whole).

In all this, however, I have neglected to discuss the component of college closest to me: my friendships. I am of the firm belief that the things people carry with them years after graduation are their memories with friends, instead of their lecture notes. I’ve made a point this to make a conscious effort to spend more with my friends, whether that means getting one-on-one meals with them every so often or playing through Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild together (excellent game). While not all the time spent together might be terribly meaningful, it does seem to me that the more there is, the higher the likelihood of there being deeper moments as well. It’s those 2am conversations about life, the universe, and everything that I’ve relished most in college for their vulnerability and meaning.

Quite a bit has happened since high school. College has been a truly incredible three-and-a-half years spent furthering multifarious interests of mine – I pored over results for hours in a physics lab, desperately rehearsed newly composed music with friends, played pickup volleyball late into the night, attempted to bake chicken pot pies from scratch, rubbed the sleep from my eyes at Sunday morning church service, and served with homeless outreach groups. It is astounding just how much one can do in college, and being able to pursue and develop so many different components of myself has been as exhausting as it’s been intensely rewarding. Such are the experiences I’ve repeated to people time and time again as I’ve returned home over winter and summer breaks, and such are the experiences I look forward to in my final semester.

Photos courtesy of Bobby Ge

Featured Image – Bobby Ge takes a stroll in the forest