From an outside perspective, the 2007-2008 school year wasn't anything spectacular.
There were no outrageous scandals or unheard-of events. Nothing earth shattering occurred. There are only a small, handful of headlines most of us will carry with us for the rest of our lives.
But for more than 3,000 of us, this May will mark the end of a journey, and we will take a step that will change our lives forever.
We will graduate.
The journey to commencement has taken us different amounts of time, along different paths and includes millions of memories.
It's impossible to realize the impact people will have on you as you make the journey that is college. And even as I look to life after college, it's impossible to know what my perspective will be when I look back in five or ten years.
I missed a lot of clear indicators about how things would be when they were happening.
One of the most influential friendships I've made in college began on the Laville patio. I started yelling at a guy I didn't know that he shouldn't start smoking. He'd informed me he just picked up the habit that day, and I was alarmed that someone would start such an awful habit at 18.
I should've realized that our friendship would turn into one dominated by nicotine and arguments. I didn't at the time. But a spat over smoking became a friendship that has changed the way I perceive the world around me and one that I hope will continue for a long time.
Undoubtedly, each of us has made such a friend in college - someone who, despite rough times and disagreements, you can't imagine the good times without them. My good times will remain in my memory in the front seat of a Ford Taurus with the windows down and "Semi-charmed Life" playing loudly from the speakers.
I've had four roommates while I've been in college. Each one of them presented a different experience of shared-space living.
I remember watching corny television shows and movies in which people talked about their college roommates and how they had a bond with them. After sharing a tiny dorm or a beat up apartment with someone for a year, I realized that those are the kinds of experiences that can't be replicated and the kinds of friends that I will cherish forever.
Everyone who has ever had a roommate knows that when you live with someone, your lives become unavoidably intertwined and a bond is created that can't be broken.
What turned out to be the biggest decision I ever made was an attempt to earn a little beer money. I applied to work at The Daily Reveille, not because I had aspirations of journalism or was interested in contributing to a historic publication.
I was a political science major with dreams of law school and a future in litigation. A judge in my home parish had given me the advice to write as much as possible as an undergrad to prepare for law school. The Daily Reveille seemed like an easy way to make a little cash and get some writing under my belt.
Within a year, I changed my major, altered my career aspirations and made some of my closest friends in college.
I can't even dream now of selling my soul (no offense law students) and attending law school. I also can't imagine having spent the past four years of college without the friends I've made at The Daily Reveille.
The people who work day in and day out to make a newspaper are more than just a bunch of lifeless mass communication majors trying to beef up their resumes to get jobs. They're a family.
I have shared my good times and my bad times with them. We have traveled as far away as Washington, D.C. and as close as the Chimes. There is no group of people on campus who know me better, and I kind of like it that way.
We've all made decisions that turned out to have a major impact on who we are and what we will become. And when I start my full-time "grown-up" job as a reporter, I will not only carry with me the lessons I learned at The Daily Reveille but also the memories of the friends I made there.
Graduation seems so final. When I walk away from campus May 16, it will feel as if I will forever be walking away from the life I have to come to know here.
And it's true, I'll never get to be an undergrad again, I'll never sit on the Laville patio again and I'll never write for The Daily Reveille again.
But the experiences and the memories are something that I'll never lose.
---- Contact Ginger Gibson at ggibson@lsureveille.com.
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