If you are not a senior, do you feel like your club president has become so much less involved this semester? Do you feel like your TA has been getting back to you much later? If you are a senior, have you been getting lazy with class and homework recently? Do you care less about school work after you receive your grad school offer or have a job lined up?  Well, as a second semester senior, I can assure you that senioritis is real, and it is hitting us hard.

What are the reasons that caused senioritis? The preliminary reason might be the mindset. If you think of your entire college experience as a path to achieve a further goal, while this goal could be getting into further education or obtaining an ideal job, the moment you receive a grad school or job offer could technically become the end mark of the path. However, due to the weird timeline of both grad school applications and job recruitment, receiving an offer does not necessarily indicate you are done with your undergrad. You still have to go to class, do your homework, take your exams, write your thesis, or even see the person you hate. You just have to deal with all of those with a constant lack of motivation until May.

Another reason that comes along with the previous one is boredom. While you could be busy with academics, research or all sorts of applications before, when all of these are either completed or put on a pause, there will be a chunk that suddenly becomes absent in your life. Not to mention a lot of us are on Senior Reduce—a sudden relief from academic stress by taking fewer classes could cause a huge gap between what you were used to and what you are experiencing now.

Different from senioritis in high school, which normally happens after students submit their college applications, senioritis in college can be more complex and applies to each individual in different ways. In high school, everyone experiences senioritis around the same time in the similar format, because everyone applies to college and all hear back roughly the same time. With this being said, your classmates are basically all in the same boat. However, in college, this varies case by case. Due to everyone’s different post-graduate goals and different industries or programs’ timeline, we experience senioritis in different ways and times. This means that not everyone is in the same boat, and people could sometimes feel lonely because others around them are experiencing different things. Don’t worry, as we all have and will undergo this, and you are not alone. It is a hundred percent normal to feel this way, but it is more important to prioritize things on the to-do list, so try not to let senioritis negatively affect the high-priority things.

So what can we do when senioritis is hitting? Download Duolingo to pick up a new language. Start the project that you have always been thinking about. Get a dating app to go on a few dates when the Boston weather doesn’t suck. Start planning a fun trip in summer before the flight and hotel rates go up. Get excited to see where the future holds, but also enjoy the last bit of your undergraduate journey as much as possible, because time does fly fast.