It’s that time of the year. After nearly a week’s worth of festivities, another St. Patrick’s Day has come and gone. Spring has finally arrived, and a hint of warmer temperatures have finally begun to make an appearance. Pretty soon, “50 Days ’til Graduation” events will start popping up along the Main Line. Seniors, do you feel it in the air?

Wait a minute. Weren’t we just counting down 100 days until graduation?

At this point in the year during our final semester at Villanova, time seems to be accelerating at an exceptionally fast rate. Meanwhile, all we really want to do is make it stop. Graduation is less than two months away, but we’d prefer not to think about it. In fact, we’d rather deny, again and again, that it’s actually going to happen.

Knowing this, many seniors soak up the most out of their college days as possible during these final few months. The contagious disease known as senioritis kicks in, and in full-swing: choosing fun over work becomes the norm.

Taken one way, this means socializing like never before. Some spend each night of the week at a different Main Line establishment: Mondays at Flip and Bailey’s, Tuesdays at Kelly’s, Wednesdays at Brownie’s and so on. Others prefer to lounge in the grass all day long outside the Oreo when it finally starts to heat up and maybe even skip a class or two (or ten).

Taken another way, such a powerful case of senioritis can also mean abandoning one or more (or even all) of one’s clubs, teams or other organizations and commitments.

This isn’t to be completely unexpected, though. Seniors are perhaps some of the busiest students among the undergrad population. Juggling job searches, graduate school applications and senior research papers can be a handful for anyone. Thus, who really needs that extra meeting or club sport practice? Straight to the chopping block they go.

The truth of the matter is that, for many, extracurricular activities simply lose the meaning they once had. After all, by the time senior year rolls along, they’ve already served their purpose as hobbies, as means of making friends and connections or as résumé boosters. While this certainly isn’t the case for everyone, it isn’t unlikely that it probably is the case for more than a few.

I remember what it was like to be a freshman, seeing my senior friends and acquaintances from various clubs seemingly drop off the face of the earth sometime during second semester. This pattern repeated itself the year after that, and the year after that.

As an underclassman, it was particularly disheartening to watch my older friends fall victim to senioritis. I had looked up to these students throughout much of the year – they weren’t just friends. They were role models, too.

From witnessing these past experiences, I pledged that I would make my best effort to stick it out with the extracurricular activities I value most throughout my college career – partly for myself, but partly for the younger classes that deserved older students who could show them the ropes. If upperclassmen don’t set a good example with responsibility and dedication, then how else can new leaders for the future be built?

Without a doubt, it’s impossible to keep every single club, pub and commitment during all four years of college. However, it’s to any campus organization’s benefit to have a faithful crop of seniors who can lead and hopefully inspire the younger generations. Every senior is allowed to have a case of senioritis – just don’t allow it to infect you too much.

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Brigid Black is a senior English and French double- major from Brooklyn, N.Y. She can be reached at [email protected].