Gwen Sobkowiak | staff writer

I’ve written about it a couple times now, but I’m still freaking out about graduating. I’ve come to the conclusion that I’m just that kind of person. I’m overly sentimental. I’m notorious for taking soda tabs and bottle caps from the functions just to “remember the night.”

Something about my personality instills in me a strong desire to make even the most mundane moment special and distinct. I like banners and group hugs; there isn’t an event where I wouldn’t like to have a Polaroid with me. Life feels overwhelming in general, so starts and ends bear particular significance.

For my first day of third grade, my sister (going into fifth grade) and I brought in fresh sunflowers from our garden to signal our joyful new starts. When I graduated high school, my family created a scavenger hunt that took me all over the city to meet with my friends and family. The tunnel was bright on both sides, always.

There are a couple traditions I’ve kept since my freshman year that help me memorialize my experience. Digitally, I’ve gained probably about 4,000 photos since I started at Duquesne. I have playlists made from certain classes and semesters of clinic, a literal shoe box for college memories and a short summary video taken at the end of every semester.

They are really only a minute or two long, my hair is somehow messy in all of them and I’m in the midst of finals week so I look like I’m dying. But even still, they present an image of me that I wouldn’t have otherwise. They’re not overly aesthetically pleasing. They’re just a couple honest thoughts about the semester. The sweet thing is they’re usually good ones.

I can look back and laugh now about how nervous I was, how silly my outfits were and how hopeful I was for things to come. I think it benefits me to have them.

College is just another phase of growing up, which I am coming to believe is true of everything. I remember a weirdly disproportionate amount of all-nighters for my relatively light course work, laying on Rooney field talking to friends who don’t even go here anymore, that week where I only ate granola bars and leftover soup from Hogan. It all seems a lot funnier and sweeter with distance. The stomach aches and bad nights of sleep kind of get lost in the wash.

But I want to remember all of it, or at least most of it. I don’t need a sugarcoated vision to be wistful over. I want something to reminisce on, but that also means remembering times that makes me grateful for a future where I’m not sleeping on a twin-sized camp mattress.

Graduation is the last step before the finish line. It’s the big curtain drop on my college experience, and while I’ll still be skulking around campus in clinical attire finishing my masters degree next year, it signals the end of a bright and impactful period in my life.

When else will I be cramped into the back rooms of Fisher Hall learning about phenomenology or sitting cross-legged on my friend’s dorm floor studying diagrams of the nervous system? I don’t see many more weekends spent writing essays, camped out on my couch with my best friends, intermittently breaking into debates over weirdly specific research topics, fueled by Red Bull and discount movie theater candy in my future.

I’m not just desperate to cram every last opportunity onto my schedule, to hang out with my friends and argue about the “Ananconda” movie, I’m desperate to take pieces of it all with me.

I want to encapsulate my experience in this place as best I can.

Right now I’ve got a pretty good start with the pictures and the videos and the memory box. I’ve got the green takeout container from Hogan, a brochure from Brottier proudly proclaiming all of their amenities (no mice?). There are some articles that I annotated from class that I still think are worth rereading, “The ones that walk away from Omelas” is on the top of the pile. I have a bunch of concert bracelets and a few ping pong balls that made it home from parties in my pocket.

The printouts of the brain stem that I color coded and pored over are neatly folded in my room, along with the excerpts from “The Yoga Sutras of Patanjali” that I had to memorize.

I still need to take more pictures with my best friend. I’m trying to get a picture inside every building on campus. Maybe if I really feel like it I’ll ask my sophomore year anatomy teacher if I can take one of her mini model organs to pair with the larynx that I got my junior year.

Much like most people, I want to tell my kids that I’m proud of my college experience. I studied hard, I tried everything, I’m going to want to look back on it once I leave. But I don’t want to feel like this was the best era of my life. I don’t want to perpetually miss something that didn’t even really happen because I’ve cut out all of the mistakes. I want the full picture, all the stray hairs and half-closed eyes.

I want to take the mess with me and love it all the same. I can’t wait to take a million photos on my last day at this place. I’ll be putting my graduation tassel at the top of my memory box, and I’m going to bawl my eyes out.

Gwendolyn Sobkowiak can be reached at sobkowiakg@duq.edu