Why you should stop working on your thesis

April at Duke: you’re coughing, your eyes are watering, the tissue you are using is saturated with mucus and your skin is blotchy and red.

“Are you crying?” a friend asks you.

You get on the defensive. “No, no,” you say. You mutter something about allergies, stutter something about pollen and a cure involving local honey.

You’re caught. You definitely are crying, and now that someone has called you out, you’re now borderline weeping. You try to hold it in. You try to stand up straight, smooth out the wrinkles in your clothes and compose yourself.

But then the montage that has been playing non-stop in your mind commences anew: the Plaza, Cameron, the gardens, that beautiful area between the Chapel and the Divinity School. Even the C-1 and the Bryan Center make it into the reel, flashing before your eyes. Then comes your freshman year dorm.

“I have to go,” you say as you take off with the bits and pieces of your remaining dignity. But just as you take the first steps you realize the double meaning of your words. You. Have. To. Go. You have to leave Duke, leave college, leave your friends and leave a life relatively lacking in consequences. You have to enter the so-called “real world.” Strange city, work, taxes, 401(k) plans and Craigslist roommates who can only be one of two things: murderers or murderous sexual deviants. The tears flow faster.

For the members of the class of 2010, the turn of spring coincides with the autumn of their Duke career. Consequently, they are stuffed to the sinus with nostalgia and their breathing is constricted with emotion. Other symptoms include: eyes glazing over in reflection, declarations of love to secret four-year crushes and contemplative solitary strolls around campus.

Very soon, these symptoms will manifest themselves on these editorial pages as Chronicle staff members pour their hearts into senior columns. You may begin to find your friends appreciating their time with you more.

You will reminisce. Do you remember countless hours talking about nothing in the Bell Tower study room freshman year? Do you remember when we played laser tag in the Sanford building after crashing alumni reunions sophomore year? Do you remember Alhambra beer and patatas bravas every Monday at Cabañon in Madrid junior year? Do you remember when we beat UNC twice and went to the FINAL FOUR IN INDIANAPOLIS senior year?

Then come the deep, reflective conversations. Have you become the person you wanted to be? How have you changed? Where will you be in 10 years? Will we still be friends? Hugging may then ensue.

You are stuck in a mire of sap. The constant torrent of emotion pouring out of your soul disgusts you. You so wish you could go to your class on East Campus without the ghosts of freshman year memories haunting you for an hour and 15 minutes. You so wish your conversations were less like final goodbyes at your deathbed. But your wishes cannot come true.

Graduation looms large with its crushing finality, and seniors are in the final death throes of college. You may try and console yourself with thoughts of reunions. Maybe you’ll go to a Duke game at Madison Square Garden. Maybe you’ll come back for homecoming. Those will all be lovely. But the terrifying truth is that May 16 you will sit with the people who have been everything to you over the past four years on the campus you have called home. On May 17, you and your community will pack up and drive Somewhere Else.

There will be new communities you will join, new friends, new colleagues, new places to frequent. But those that you had here—your frat, your sorority, your freshman year hall, your study abroad group, your intramural team, your favorite classmates from seminar, a bench by your old dorm, the staircase leading up to Cosmic, Shooters, your favorite treadmill in Wilson, your table in Perkins—those have mere weeks left.

There is no turning your back on the reality that an entire chapter of your life will soon come to an end all at once. Now is the time to mourn and celebrate it properly, to give it a proper send-off. So, exit out of Word, cancel your meeting with your advisor and stop working on your thesis, problem set or paper. Get your closure before the curtain closes on your time as a Duke student.

Jordan Rice is a Trinity senior. His column runs every other Tuesday.