Dear Returning Students,

It’s 6:45 a.m. and you went to bed three hours ago (that finance exam wasn’t going to make flashcards for itself, although it would be amazing if it could). As the productive student you are, you woke up just before the sunrise (thanks to an almanac that your eccentric aunt got you for Christmas) and hopped on your computer, fueled by nothing but Starbucks and the motivation to snatch up all the cool classes before your lazy peers.

You snooze, you lose… out on the opportunity to schedule all your classes on Monday to ensure a six-day weekend.

This is a confusing time for you — the last time you woke up this early was to pound out the final thousand words of a paper you had forgotten about. It always a weird time, with the world not entirely dark, but not lit up by the sun just yet. You become apprehensive about turning on your light, feeling like your cheating your eyes out of something special The world exists in a temporary lens of grey and everything blends together in shadow.

And you just have to register for archery.

For the past week, you have been thanking your distant ancestors for adopting their last name so you could be first in line to pick a perfect fall semester before graduation in December. The sacrifices they have made to pass this lineage down to you have proved invaluable in ensuring that the first letter of your surname is just above the cutoff point, the difference between registering for a statistics class in Allendale and a statistics class in Holland.

With less than a minute left before registration begins, you begin to frantically refresh the page, hopeful that your cell phone clock runs on a 30-second delay. You will get the leg up on all those other greedy students, even if you have to break the space-time continuum to do it. No one will take these classes from you, some you need to graduate at the end of the semester.

Time’s up. The curtain rises and you dash through the class lists.

Capstone? Check.

Theme classes? Taken care of.

Advanced Creative Nonfiction? …It’s got to be there somewhere. I mean, these are the last credits you require to finish college forever. There is not a chance in Satan’s snowing-in-March hell that you can miss this class. Failure is not an option, and neither is graduating without fulfilling the writing requirement.

But it isn’t there. In fact, the only semester your class is available in is winter. You had planned for everything except this. Whatever cosmic-karma deity you upset, he hates you and wants you to spend another semester trolling around.

What can you do? You stare sadly at the screen, and it suddenly becomes clear to you that you are no longer in charge of your destiny.

And you have to warn as many people as possible through whatever means you can. This can happen, and it can happen to you, in the second-person. Plan ahead, far ahead, so as to avoid this tragedy (that is 100% hypothetical).

Love, Chris

(Future Super Senior)

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