Well, it’s over. After tens of applications, multiple rejection letters, many different versions of the same cover letter, two interviews, and more resume fiascos than I’d like to admit, I’ve rejected one internship and accepted another. Phew… I guess.

Lately I’ve been realizing just how close we are to the end of the year. It feels like just yesterday it was August and I was lugging my suitcases and boxes up the stairs to my new dorm room, and all of a sudden I’m writing final papers and signing forms to get ready for my trip abroad. Just this morning I woke up and realized that this was the last day of the last real weekend of the year. But even though it seems like this year barely happened, looking back on it, I did a lot. Here’s a (short) list of my accomplishments, milestones, and life-changing-events:

1. I tested into upper-division German after teaching myself over the summer and went into my first class with above-average grammar comprehension and a vocabulary gleaned from soccer games and pop songs.
2. I decided to spend my entire junior year abroad. Did I come to terms with it? Not really.
3. I wrote my first real long research paper. 20 pages. Related milestone: nearly died writing my first real long research paper.
4. Went through a mid-college-career crisis, switched advisors twice, cried and moaned and keened for months but eventually came out a calm and collected German major/Political Science minor.
5. Got an internship.
6. Stopped behaving like a freshman.

In short, I grew up. Just writing all of this down, I realized that nearly all of the big events that have happened to me have happened because I took charge and set a path for myself. Even though I still feel like a kid, I’ve realized that I can do things for myself—I can construct big term papers, plan out my course of study, plan out my summer, and really take care of myself! As hard as it is for me to believe, I guess I’m becoming… an adult.

In about six weeks, I’m going to turn 20. I’ll have crossed the line from teenager to adult in the most definite way possible. As bizarre and, um, terrifying as that is to me, I feel like I’ve done enough this year to prepare myself for the long and scary journey of becoming an adult. And I’m sure that next year at this time, if I’m writing down another list of accomplishments, one of those will be “stopped behaving like a sophomore.” Maybe when I’m 20—and a thorough not-teenager any more—I’ll be ready to start acting like an adult and stop looking at adulthood with trepidation.

But right now I’ve got more immediate worries than how I’m going to feel in a year. I’ve got a term paper on Vertigo that isn’t going to write itself (if anyone has any insight into how gradients of darkness and light are used around the Madeleine character, especially in the early part of the film, CONTACT ME) and a whole lot of reading. So: if I talk to you again this semester, bis später. If I don’t, bis mein letztes Jahr. See you senior year!

Julia