by zoe bell
2/1/2024
5:45PM
As of last Friday, it's official.
Not only am I no longer going to head in to work each week at the Gold Room, the storage facility where all of the Dodge College’s cameras, lights and sound equipment stay to be meticulously inventoried and allocated to classes and student productions, but I am no longer going to be a student at Dodge at all; nor Wilkinson, or any school at Chapman for that matter.
In fact, as of last Friday, I will never be a student again. Hopefully, that is. Technically I stopped being a student right when the Fall semester ended in December, but this weird period between the holidays and the Spring that we call January has felt more like an extended "interterm" than it does the end of my entire college career. But now that the Spring semester has officially started and I've been left behind with almost nothing to do and no more classes to walk to, professors to meet or assignments to complete, it's finally setting in that this is it; it's really over. The past four and a half years of my life, finished just like that. But it's the end of more than that, really; there’s this carefree lack of responsibility attached to being a student where anything beyond good grades and academic busywork would best be left up to the real adults to take care of. But now I’m the real adults! So what's next, huh?
It's frightening. Exciting? Maybe. Liberating? Absolutely. But frightening too. Now I've got to go out into the world and allow myself to be utilized in the workforce, attempting to occupy a niche that nimbly walks the delicate tightrope of being just marketable enough to put food on the table while still being something I'd be content doing every week of my life for the next fifty years. And because school is over and I've got very little to do with my time each day, I feel like I'm left with nothing else to do other than think about it; that awful, cosmic uncertainty we all feel whenever we have to experience a momentous, pivotal, and altogether horrifying first moment of the rest our lives. And that in turn puts a lot of pressure on me to do something about it right now.
But there's not a lot that I can do about it right now; not while I'm still finishing the movie anyway (you'll see soon). That's going to take at least until March, not to mention my role as sound designer on another thesis film is about to kick off. I may not be going to class anymore, but I've certainly still got some final schoolwork for the time being.
So I guess I am technically still a student for a little while longer, in some capacity. Right?
Zoe <3