It’s one thing to be left in Ames for the summer term. That carries all its own pitfalls – a college town drained of its collegiate population, two-hour long classes that don’t change every other day, the Iowa summer heat and humidity, and the lack of a beach, deck chair or pina colada all make the list.

It gets worse.

There are those among us who, upon the conclusion of the semester on Friday, will cross a momentous threshold in our academic careers: We will become Super Seniors.

Now, some would see that label as a mark of shame. Your four-year plan, so touted at orientation – which is now nothing but a ghostly na’ve apparition of long ago – decayed quickly, degrading into a hurried attempt to get into quickly filling classes you should have been in long ago. Whether it was bad planning, bad circumstances, bad habits, or a curriculum change that doomed it, no one can ever really know. Maybe it was Genetics 320. Or Stat 226. Or Chemistry 231. Perhaps it was all three.

Then, suddenly, somewhere in the preceding year, the realization was thrust upon you by your degree audit: when the rest of your friends, colleagues and acquaintances – many of the same faces you ran around with so annoyingly like school kids at orientation, the same people who cared enough to call the next day and make sure you made it home from the party, the people who stayed with you until the wee hours to finish that group project, and maybe even a few you’ve been with since high school – will now move on without you.

But, perhaps, that judgment is far too harsh.

There is another reality here for those of us who will, come Friday, pass into the ranks of the four-plus crowd. It’s not that we’ve necessarily underachieved or over-imbibed. Being a Super Senior ought to be about seeing the ghastly expressions of the new freshmen in August when you tell them just how long you’ve been here.

Therein lies another facet of Super Seniority – the Aristotle factor.

At this point, we’ve practically seen it all – we’ve Veishea’d (through its highest highs and lowest lows), we’ve (at least most of us, but sadly not all of us) Campaniled, we’ve been through the traditions enough to lead others through them ourselves. We’ve taken most of the classes – we’re practically on a first-name basis with half the faculty – and, at this point, can tell you more about a course, a professor, a TA or a lecture hall than ratemyprofessors.com ever could. We have become the elder statesmen of underclassmen. At long last we feel qualified to speak with some amount of authority to those things which the underclassmen are still struggling to understand.

Yes, people write some crazy things on Page 4 of the Daily, we know.

Yes, those are swans. Don’t chase them – we’ve tried.

We have effectively become repositories of the secret idiosyncrasies of Iowa State, and we’re still here. While many of our friends have moved on to gain employment and lead their lives, we are still basking in the wonderment and rampant irresponsibility that is college.

To those making their exit – to Greg, Dan, Grant, Kristi, Christina, Jodi, Kayla, Niki and all the hundreds of others: Thank you. It has been a fun ride -ÿwe’ve met people and done things that we can never and will never forget. Stop by to see us sometime -ÿthe football stadium renovation ought to have plenty of space for all of us in the fall.

To my fellow Super Seniors: Time is short, and college only happens once. We’re just making the best of it. Think of it as though we’ve played the game, and taken it into extra innings. The motto of our fine institution is “Science with Practice.” We’re just practicing a little longer.

– Ryan Frederick is a (super) senior in management from Orient.