I am still frighteningly undecided about my future. With less than a month until graduation, I have taken to interrogation.

Take, for instance, last Saturday. I was watching a baseball game with my friends Greg and Kieran when I could no longer help myself. During the seventh-inning stretch, I pounced.

“So,” I said, trying to sound casual, “how do you guys feel about graduation?”

Their anxious faces told me I had been about as casual as a penguin at the zoo during feeding time.

“Well, it’s definitely exciting to start something new,” Greg began, and then he hesitated for a moment as he weighed his options. “Having a steady income will be great, but being at school allows you more free time and opportunities to do things, so I think it’s a catch-22.”

“Well, Jill’s excited to start working,” I informed him.

“That’s crazy,” he said. “There is no way working will be better than school.”

Now on the edge of my seat, I turned to Kieran.

“I’m nervous about it all,” Kieran said, tilting his head introspectively. “I don’t really know what to expect from any of it — graduation, grad school. Do you think you’re ready?”

How does one really know when one is “ready” to graduate? The way I see it, graduation is like being blindsided by a freight train, and everyone has his or her own way of coping.

Professional students are often indifferent to graduation because they have anywhere from two to eight more years of school still to come. They know graduate school will be different from college, and like my friend Kieran, they have mixed feelings about those differences. More often than not, this group will put graduation in terms of student loans.

The yuppies will tell you without hesitation that they are excited to graduate. Ask them about their futures, and they will whip out BlackBerrys to give you the name of a future employer, a ballpark salary figure and a future address. Usually of the overachieving variety, these students tend to use pleasant euphemisms, such as “moving on” or “the next step,” to describe the future.

The reluctant professionals have resigned themselves to graduation. Like my friend Greg, they are not looking forward to it but will not be blindsided by it. Unlike the clingers-on, the reluctant professionals usually have concrete plans that they avoid talking about. They will modify the phrase “I have a job” with words such as “temporary” or “stepping stone.”

The clingers-on drag their feet all the way to picking up their diplomas, and they will refuse any graduation gift that will associate them with the word “alumni.” They are also often markedly undecided about their futures. Mention the word “graduation,” and they will cover their ears and run in the opposite direction shouting, “I don’t want to think about it!”  

Most seniors probably know in which category they fit. I certainly do, and here’s a word to anyone rummaging through displays of university paraphernalia in search of the perfect graduation gift for me: I will beat you with a stick if you give me anything that says “alumni.”

Rachel Hare is a senior French language and literature and journalism major. She can be reached at hare at umdbk dot com.