I feel it setting in.
The lethargy, the laziness, the growing itch to just relax. It pulls me away from work and towards video games; away from articles like these towards something — anything — leisurely and for myself. Chomp the comp? Nah, I’ll chomp on some chips and watch something instead.
That’s right: it’s senioritis.
Defined by Google as “a decline in motivation or performance” in high school and college seniors, senioritis was not something on my radar for this semester until a few weeks ago. It’s also worth mentioning that I’ve got it pretty good; my senioritis is more of an intellectual curiosity than a GPA torpedo, and that’s not the case for everyone. Losing motivation can seriously impact your mental health and classroom experience, and can be due to any number of reasons.
However, self-diagnosing myself with this venerable institution of pedagogical sloth has revealed a couple of interesting facts about myself and my final term here at Allegheny — and perhaps it will help you understand yourself, your students and your peers a little better.

The Good
I’ll start with the silver lining; I’ve stopped caring. I don’t mean some extreme form of academic nihilism, but rather what feels like freedom from years of panicking over my grades. I’m on track to graduate, and at this point the only way I’d probably miss walking across the stage in May is if I actively fail myself.
A prime example of this is the “B-” I received a couple weeks ago in a class. In past semesters, that might have been the start of a minor academic crisis, triggering a full evaluation of what I was doing in the class and what I needed to change in order to finish the course with an “A.”
This time, it was just a bump in the road. Not welcome news, to be fair, but not the end of the world either. I read the instructor’s feedback and will incorporate it in the next assignment, but I really don’t care about the little number on Canvas or its final impact on my GPA.
This incident has made me realize how much more focused I am on just learning. If, as senioritis tells me, the grade doesn’t matter, why should I still show up in my classes? Because I’m genuinely interested in them, and that interest is allowed to take precedence over grade-based anxiety. Coursework goes from a job to something closer to a hobby, something I enjoy for my own personal and intellectual growth rather than my daily required grind.
In this sense, a lack of motivation — and indeed performance — on individual class assignments is a symptom of a deeper caring for the material, not a departure from it. Grades are only so good of a metric of student achievement. It seems as though, at least in one case, poorer grades are a sign of a richer learning experience.

The Bad
Now that you’re convinced I’m dropping buzzwords to justify being lazy, I’ll fold; this isn’t all sunshine and roses. Losing motivation means losing motivation, and it’s made my 12-credit workload feel like 20.
Just because I can frame senioritis and the subsequent hit to my academic performance as “being free from the pressure of grades,” doesn’t make it any less of a decline in my work. I have found myself struggling to focus and get stuff done a lot more than in past semesters — it’s just hard to muster the energy and care to do so.
And honestly, I think this is just the senior experience. Though I’ve never really stopped to count, I’ve probably been working 55-60 hours a week for the last three years — zipping from an overloaded course schedule to extracurriculars galore. Evenings and weekends are spent writing, editing, doing homework, planning events, you name it. In the moment, it feels exhilarating, a non-stop validation that I can do things and be useful.
There are also my personal circumstances. I’ve always used academics as a way to bury my head in the sand and avoid processing certain parts of my past — and now the bill is coming due. In the face of existential questions of identity and place within the world, everything else fades away. The questions are nothing new; it’s just now I actually have time to answer them, and I don’t want to.
Without that pedal-to-the-metal energy, homework and clubwork starts to lose its luster. It’s easier to second-guess why I’m doing what I do, to question whether I should do something rather than if I can, when there’s time to think about it.

The Unexpected
So now that I’ve convinced you that senioritis is both liberating and traumatizing, what does this all mean? Why did I decide to spend time and ink to discuss something so seemingly contradictory? It’s because I don’t think senioritis is an academic affliction. Rather, it is a byproduct of life bleeding into the protected environment of, in this case, college.
The more I think about it, the more it seems clear that the two sides of senioritis I have described are just facets of life out in the “real world.”
Not caring about grades? That’s the big-picture perspective of life; when there are jobs to find and bills to pay, individual work assignments fade away. Like a bad grade fading against the shine of a diploma, a single bad day at work might not feel so bad if you know that you’re going back to a home with food on the table.
Having to handle burnout and identity on the fly? That’s also just what it’s like “out there” — you have to be able to manage your own mental health, juggle work and life at the same time. You’ll have to answer questions of identity and worldview while still finding the motivation to go to work and get things done.
And to hammer it all home, these are all things I will have to be doing in just under three months; a short time period after thinking in terms of semesters and years. I used to count the days until summer break was over and I could come back to college, and every year, that counter started at just over 100. It’s a little eye-opening to realize that I’m now less than 90 days away from graduating.
To invoke cliche, college has moved very quickly, and the “real world” that looms after walking across the stage is rushing towards me faster and faster.
In this perspective, senioritis is actually a good thing. It’s my subconscious starting to work through questions of life beyond graduation. So rather than avoid senioritis as some nebulous grade-tanker, I’m going to try and engage with it as pre-graduation prep for post-graduation life, recalibrating myself to think about big-picture questions and figure out who I am. There may yet be a lesson or two waiting for me on the other side.