It’s 3 a.m. and I’m hours from sleep. My nails are bit down below the skin and I have paced track marks into the carpet all around my bedroom. My thoughts are racing at a mile a minute as I desperately attempt to find an answer for the question that seems to follow me wherever I go as I enter this fateful semester; what am I going to do with my life?

Seniors at Syracuse University with graduation looming less than five months away are expected to pick a career path and embark on a journey into reality that will essentially determine the course of their adult lives. This is a decision that is expected to be made in the same year that many of us became able to drink legally.

We spend our days biding our time until classes are through so we can kick back with our friends and forget about the responsibilities that seem to be multiplying by the minute. The mere thought of Thursday nights seems to be the only thing that keeps us motivated through the papers, exams, group meetings, internships and part-time jobs that have taken over our carefree college existences.

The thought of leaving Syracuse is as unnerving as it is sudden. As this thought manifests itself, finding the answers to these unknowns seems pertinent to our sanity. If there’s one thing that some of my senior friends and I seem to know without a doubt, it’s that we are in no rush to get out into the real world.

‘The thing I fear the most is that I’ve set my hopes too high and that I’ll have to face the harsh reality of entry-level jobs with crummy salaries,’ says senior psychology major Sarah Sommers. She, like the rest of us, is unsure where her major may take her once school ends. After all, at the mere age of 21 it’s difficult to be sure that our interests won’t change once we begin to apply what we’ve learned in the real world.

Then we must consider the undeniable chance that we won’t be able to cut it in the real world and will be forced to move back home before we even get a chance to hang our diplomas. There’s no denying the fact that failure is a pesky yet menacing thought that lingers in the back of our minds as we try to look that far into our futures.

‘My biggest fear is not being able to find a job and having to live in my parents’ house until I’m 28; eating cereal for dinner and watching reruns of ‘Saved By the Bell,” said senior sociology major Gary Goldsmith.

For many, however, professional uncertainty is far from being their only concern.

‘My greatest fear is that I’ll leave Syracuse and only see a handful of these people ever again in my life,’ said English major Farrell Fisher.

In the face of all this overwhelming fear, anxiety and uncertainty, I’ve realized that there is only one thing that we can do to make this easier on ourselves; and lucky for us its what we do best here at ‘Cuse.

We have to keep up the Thursday nights this school has made legendary, the happy hour Fridays and the sporting events where we proudly wear way too much orange. But most of all, we have to spend every minute we can with the people we are blessed to call family – at this school that we are blessed to call home.

Katherine Paster is a contributing columnist whose columns appear biweekly in The Daily Orange. E-mail her at kapaster@syr.edu.