On the first day of classes, my freshman year, I walked into a classroom in the fourth entryway of McCosh Hall and sat down. It was one of those über-Princetonian lecture halls: wooden chairs with desks attached, screwed into the ground. Creaky floors. Questionable circulation. Windows up and down both sides of the room. (When we clapped at the end of the semester I felt like I had fallen out of my life and into a movie starring Kevin Kline.) The professor walked in. He was older than I thought he would be and, once he spoke, noticeably British. I took furious notes. We hadn't even done any reading and already he was saying things I knew I should commit to memory. Not for any test (we didn't have exams in that class, anyway), but for life. Wow, I remember thinking as I left the lecture hall, slightly stunned, everything they say about college is true.

Four-ish years later, I was sitting in the same classroom--in the same seat, even--for my last class at Princeton. It was a coincidence of epic proportions, but when have the de Plumes experienced anything less? Three weeks before, I had turned in my thesis, advised by the very same professor who piqued my intellect and set the bar incredibly high for subsequent classes.

It's amazingly easy to chart your progress when you sit in the same seat freshman fall to senior spring. And if I can be allowed to step away from my academic roots for a second and--shock, horror--quantify what's happened in the past four years at Princeton, I would say that 90% of the change in me has been for the better.

This morning I picked up my cap and gown and beer jacket and yearbook and even though I don't graduate for approximately another month and even though I still have a paper to write, a radio show to do, an exam to take, and comps to sit, it really seems like all this is actually happening.