This is it. It’s finally sinking in: four more weeks of class, four more weeks of college. And as I walk around campus, I begin reconciling with all the versions of myself that I could have been, but I wasn’t.
Perhaps I could have been a finance major. My favorite place to study would have been the trading room in Mendoza, with all the stocks and trading screens empowering me to go on to become a sales and trading professional.
Or perhaps I could have been an English major. I would have spent countless hours on O’Shag’s second floor, debating whether Faulkner is better than Hemingway. I would have been looking at becoming a teacher or an author in the future.
Maybe I could have been a math major. Spending hours in Hayes-Healy, calculating derivatives or using Euler’s method.
I could have been an engineer. My home would have been Fitzpatrick Hall, hunched over CAD models and stress tests, learning to build things that hold the world together — bridges, circuits, systems.
And so my reconciliation goes. Envisioning the major I could have chosen, the clubs I could have participated in.
But as the end draws near, I face the fact that none of those versions of me ever really existed — and I’m not sure I’d trade them for the one that did.
Because the person who showed up was someone shaped not just by classrooms, but by the people who filled the spaces in between. By late nights that started as study sessions and became something closer to growing up. By friendships that taught me how to show up for someone, to disagree and still stay, to laugh until it hurts and then talk about something that really does.
The version of me that exists is not just the product of the major I chose or the papers I turned in — she is the product of every conversation that ran too long, every shared meal, every person who saw me on a hard day and stayed anyway.
I could have had a different major, lived in a different dorm, found a different table to sit at freshman year — and I would have become someone else entirely. That thought used to unsettle me; now it fills me with a feeling of gratitude. Gratitude for the particular combination of choices and accidents that made me this person, with these people, in this place.
I made peace with my path, not because it was perfect, but because it was genuinely mine. And as I get ready to leave Notre Dame, I’ve stopped mourning the versions of myself I never became, but I am proud of the one I am — and genuinely, quietly excited to meet the one I’m still becoming.
