As I near the end of my career at Marymount I cannot help but pause from time to time, in the hallways, café, and classrooms, and think about the amount of times I’ve walked underneath the banners, and shuffled up staircases, and seen the same faces for the past four years. As graduation creeps closer, I find myself thinking about how much I’ve learned in the past four years.

I began to chew on this idea. I scrolled through my mental file cabinet, freshman year classes, experiences, friendships, onto sophomore and then junior year, and then of course the hectic college process of senior year, and then into the almost twilight zone many of us are floating in right now.

After thinking for quite some time, I concluded that my largest fear leaving the safe walls of Marymount was not that I would have an unhygienic kleptomaniac roommate in college, or that I will have a terrible college experience, or that I won’t be able to survive without my brother and father in the room over. My biggest fear was leaving High School, realizing how little I know.

How little I know? What do I mean?

Well, really how little all of us know. After high school, I leave knowing how to take the derivative of a function, how to craft a compare and contrast essay, how to use SAT vocab words in a sentence, how to build up enough confidence to ask a boy to a school dance, how hemoglobin in my blood carries oxygen around my body, and many other things that have nestled their way into my brain over the last four years. But really, I leave realizing how little I know in the grand scheme of things.

Naturally, some of you might think I am being cynical. How can she say we know so little, we’ve spent the past four years blood sweat and tears learning?! Yes while that is true my friends and classmates, my intentions are anything but cynical. I am amazed at all that we’ve done these past four years, and we should be very proud that we’ve finished with flying colors. But that doesn’t deviate from the point that we still know very little. We are each one, just one, able bodied, heart beating, neuron transmitting human, in a state, a country, a continent, a world of people. We know very little in comparison to the enormous world we live in.

When we all step off campus for the very last time, carry everything you have learned. Carry every memory, every laugh, cry, formula, fact, and vocabulary word in hand, and use those to explore the world even more.

Take advantage of the education we are lucky enough to have had, and take advantage of the unknown. There is an entire world out there and we are each just one.