HOFBERG: Memoirs of a Graduating Graduate Student

This morning when I woke up at noon, I rolled over to find that I wasn’t in my own bed and the cat curled up at my feet wasn’t Lars.

You’re probably assuming that means that I woke up in some stranger’s bed who I dragged home from the bar after a night of boogying to Top 40 beats and pounding Bud Lights, which, if you know me, wouldn’t be a completely ridiculous scenario to assume.

But, actually, I woke up, fully clothed, lying next to my favorite French woman, Raphaelle, who was wearing a full tiger onesie and who still had chocolate crusted on the corner of her mouth from midnight snacking on a box of 18 chocolate chip cookies that she bought from Insomnia Cookies that afternoon.

If waking up from a sugar cookie-induced hangover after a night of watching the Miss France beauty pageant in the Back Bay apartment of one of my dearest friends from Boston University doesn’t perfectly sum up my graduate school experience, then I don’t know what does.

When I first moved to Boston in 2006 to attend BU as an undergraduate, I was miserable and homesick.

I hated this city.

For nine months, I cried. And cried. And cried. And cried.

I pouted in the bunk bed of my fifth floor Sleeper Hall dorm room and missed nearly all of my classes. On the rare occasion that I did make it to my lectures, I usually sat in the back and slept through them.

For the most part, the only other time I ever left my dorm room was to venture down to the East Campus dining halls to load up on plates of salami and cheese sandwiches and bowls of Lucky Charms or to smoke joints rolled with the most mediocre marijuana on Chester Street.

Not surprisingly, after the worst year of my academic career, I dropped out of BU and moved back to California, which, in hindsight, is one of my biggest regrets.

The good news is, however, that I was given a second chance to do Boston right. Last year, older and wiser, I moved back after being accepted as a journalism graduate student at BU’s College of Communication, and this time around, not a single day has passed by where I haven’t thought to myself that it was the best decision I ever made.

As I turn in my final project and my time at BU comes to an end this week, I’m bombarded with bittersweet feelings of excitement, nostalgia, sadness, happiness, nervousness and pride.

The truth is, if you ask me what I want to be when I grow up (even though at 26 years old, some people tell me that I am already grown up), I’ll tell you that I want to be a student.

I love writing papers. I love reading. I love camping out in coffee shops to finish homework assignments that I most definitely have procrastinated on. I love the stress associated with deadlines. And I love the stomach butterflies that tickle on the first day of class.

The fact that I’m graduating means that my dream of being a career student is coming to an end.

But my experience as a graduate student has been so much more than an academic experience, and what I’ve learned to love about Boston is so much more than my enrollment in narrative nonfiction and journalism research classes.

Actually, the success of my experience in Boston as a graduate student can be measured not only by the good grades I received on reported stories, but by the number of times I woke up in a bed next to my friend in a tiger onesie or the number of times my dinner parties ended up in a mob of my friends marching to Common Ground for 1990s night or even the number of times that I had to walk to CVS to buy more condoms.

I have to admit that before I packed up my things and my cat and made the move back to Boston last year, I was nervous that history was about to repeat itself and I was going to spend the next year and a half in bed, crying and crying and crying, and longing for sunny days in California and smoking mediocre marijuana joints in the neighborhood streets of Lower Allston.

Alright. Fine. I’ll admit it. Last year, in the dead of winter, when my heat got shut off for two weeks and you could see your breath in my kitchen because my miserable roommate ruined our relationship with the oil company, I did long for sunny days in California.

But good God, that is a trivial complaint, and the difference between today and 2006 is that small hiccups aren’t going to be a reason that I give up on Boston and head back to California.

I love this city and, actually, I’m going to stick around for a while.

Boston can’t get rid of me that easily this time.

And neither can my friend in the tiger onesie, because I’m about to roll over and go back to bed.