I’ve come to the conclusion that the years one spends in college are much like running toward the water on a sunny beach. It’s an adventure-a great adventure-to attend college and explore the possibilities in the world. But this adventure, as so often happens with adventures, can end in tragedy.

Your college experience starts off with gusto. You are a happy, healthy, smiling freshman nervously attending classes, clutching books close to your bosom and praying that people will like you. It’s an endearing picture. This is the run on the dry, sandy beach. There are no problems, you just keep running toward that vast blue ocean of opportunity, oblivious to the waves ahead.

As your freshman year ends, you become aware of the change in the sand beneath your feet. Suddenly the sand is wet, hard and compacted, and there is a passing thought that maybe, just maybe, your second year might not be as simple as the first. But it’s just a momentary pause as you leap into the foamy shallows of the schooling sea. You congratulate yourself on covering the distance on the beach in record time. My, how the year has just flown by, and you look back and see your footsteps being trampled by those following behind you.

You’ve entered your second-sophomore-year of college. The water here is warm and shallow. Heated by the sun of success and refreshed by the small waves of future prospects, you are blithely unaware of the larger breakers in the distance. You are happy and realize that the water is getting deeper and cooler, but certainly not unmanageable.

Sophomore year is an interesting year in college. There are the classes that you are required to take-the core curriculum-and you attend some of those classes, opting out of others, enjoying a “real” college experience. In many ways, though you do not yet know it, your sophomore year defines how you will survive the rest of your college career. Will you dive toward the deep waters, or will you meander into them, adjusting to their differences slowly, but methodically? Both options have merit, but the decision is yours alone. Regardless, you enter into your third year of college of your own volition.

Junior year, the water gets deep, cold and murky. Where splashing about in the shallows during your sophomore year seemed like a fun use of your time, the water here is up to your knees, and it is actually slowing down your movement. It’s harder to walk and move around, harder to advance into the much deeper waters. You find that you have lost the motivation that propelled you forward from freshman year into sophomore year. The tide is coming in, and the water continues to rise.

If you are lucky, junior year offers more opportunity for class variation. The more water you have, the more options you have; in counterpoint, the more water you have, the more difficult it is to move. The options you choose tend to be those options you reach the quickest – they’re not necessarily the options you want but once you choose, you become stuck with your decision. Majors, minors, certificates, degrees. Junior year is crunch time for planning your future beyond the crashing breakers that are all too close now. Looking toward the beach, you can no longer see your footprints-they are a distant memory.

You are drawn by the rip-tide of college into the deep, frothing waters of senior year, and the prospects of surviving are becoming dim. The year is made up of requirements and classes that feel as though the waters will close over your head at any time. You could go under at any moment, and your feet are having trouble finding solid ground beneath them. The only thing that keeps you treading water, inching out to sea, is the bobbing yacht sitting just beyond the breakers of graduation, with all your friends aboard calling to you.

You struggle and you swim and, though you think all through senior year that it would be so much easier to just give up and drown, you swim on. As the breakers crash over your head, you will graduate and you will be free.

There will come a day when you will climb onto the yacht of success, and that is the day that all college students must swim toward.

Andrew C. Emmerich is a senior studying English and secondary education in the College of Public Service.