To look back on my college career and try to summarize it is not a simple task. I know it’s a cardinal rule to avoid cliches, but the best way I can wrap it up is this: the past four years have truly changed my life.
High school went by fast, but boy did it have moments that dragged on. There are good memories I can fondly look back on and people I still hold dear to my heart, but you would have to pay me an unfathomable amount of money to do it all again.
I’d do these past four years over again in a heartbeat.
The idea of college got me through every day of high school. By the time I was looking at universities, I couldn’t wait to get out of my hometown and find the joy of Athens my Ohio University alumni parents had told me about for my entire life. There was a part of me that worried it wouldn’t live up to my expectations, but there was a stronger part that knew it would be everything I wanted. OU proved the latter right.
I left high school in tears of relief. As I sit at my desk in The Post’s newsroom writing this, tears welling in my eyes, all I can think is “no other sadness in the world would do.”
I found a home here in every sense of the word, and I can’t emphasize enough how lucky I feel for that. You know you’ve found something truly wonderful when it makes saying goodbye so incredibly difficult.
At this moment, I am grateful for the sadness. I am grateful for the tears. I am grateful to have a place I will miss so dearly. I am grateful to have found a feeling of comfort with each of my dear, sweet friends.
I have found all of these people because of The Post and that is not something I take lightly. In an incredibly blurred sequence of events, we all met online via Slack messages and Zoom meetings in the fall of 2020 from our homes’ bedrooms.
Suddenly we lived down the hall or just a floor apart from one another, spending so much time together we didn’t know how to go to the dining hall on our own. Those same principles still applied as our dorms became apartments and our meal plans became grocery store runs.
In four years, there have been pockets of time where we watched our older friends move on to the next chapter of their lives, graduations marking the end of each era in which our friendships’ stomping ground was Athens. For me, that meant rewatches of “Captain America: The Winter Soldier,” late-night walks around Athens in the summer, accidental sleepovers and a variety of parties with every theme under the sun thrown by whoever was willing to offer up their house.
Everyone in our mass group of “Posties” is all grown up, but the catch is that now it's our turn. The 20-somethings who didn’t get a high school graduation finally get their time to shine. Now, we are not just the ones saying goodbye, but doing the leaving ourselves.
In our leaving, we leave behind our “want to go get a snack?” texts, working in the newsroom until 1:30 a.m., rants about group projects, cramming into our dorm rooms just so we can sit and talk, endless nights on Court Street and everything in between.
Counting down to graduation not only means figuring out how to pack up all of our stuff, but also the inevitability of going from seeing each other every single day to scheduling FaceTimes into our calendars. Maybe we have slight attachment issues, but despite everything we have gone through, we want to remain as we are. To me, that means we did something right.
Athens will always remember us, and it will hold onto our memories until the day we are together on the bricks again. So for now, the CI pool tables will wait for us to put another quarter down. The Union will wait for us to come to another show. Mill Street will make sure there’s a porch for us to sit on.
To Athens, thank you for being exactly what I needed as a fresh 18-year-old. To The Post, thank you for handing me the most spectacular group of people I have ever met and who I will cherish for the rest of my life. To everyone OU gave me, thank you for meeting me exactly where I was at whatever point the universe crossed our paths.
Long live all the magic we made.
Tate Raub is a senior studying journalism at Ohio University. Please note that the views and opinions of the columnists do not reflect those of The Post. Want to talk more about it? Let Tate know by tweeting her @tatertot1310.
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