Tim Kehrer/The Hoya Michael Kurdyla (COL ’06) scurries into Georgetown’s famous underground tunnels for the final time.

“Don’t worry about what you don’t know. Life’s a dance you learn as you go,” a favorite song of mine goes. It’s an adage which I’ve come to appreciate more and more over the course of the past four years.

It certainly was hard to accept at the beginning. I came to college clinging to a security blanket, living with a high school friend. It framed most of freshman year as all of New South 3 knew us as “Chair Guy” – my roommate had a comfortable desk chair that he had bought at Office Max – and “Computer Guy” – I quickly realized that a good way to get in with the girls on the floor was to offer a useful service. Fixing their laptops was an obvious calling.

From there, standard protocol is to branch out. You do some things that everyone else does; you do some things that set you apart from the rest. You get involved with a few clubs. You go to a few parties with six kegs and a thousand freshmen. You realize that the first group of friends you make doesn’t have to be – and shouldn’t be – the last. You learn that drunken exploring is not always the best idea after falling down a ladder, falling through a window and falling off the top bunk in LXR on the last night you ever have to live in a dorm. You transfer out of the business school and into the College, even if it makes you a junior with sophomore standing and enough credits to be a senior. You figure out that splitting a one-liter bottle of Grey Goose among three people and then topping that off with a bottle of wine apiece can’t possibly end well. You experience the joy of barbecuing on the Village A rooftops and watching “24” afterward, always expecting no less than three empty beer cans to be hurled at the TV during the hour-long broadcast. You see your life flash before your eyes after spinning out in a snowdrift on I-294 in a futile attempt to see the Hoyas play in Champagne, Ill. And you drink away your sorrows at an Irish pub in Dayton on St. Patrick’s Day, separated from all of your best friends in the world except one.

Standard protocol doesn’t seem so standard anymore. You suddenly realize that all your worries about starting a new life away from home – getting involved, meeting new people and making something of yourself – have been rendered mute.

More importantly, you recognize that the things that make all those events significant is not the great stories you’ll someday be able to tell your kids to prove that, back in the day, you actually knew how to have a little fun. It’s the people you shared them with.

There are just two times in my life that I’ve gone and sat down by the Potomac. Surprisingly enough, one of those was my first night of freshman year after my parents climbed into our family’s hideous yellow Ford Escape and headed back to the great state of New Jersey.

In light of all of the stupid antics I’ve pulled in the three years and nine months since that Sunday night, I can’t help but sit back and scratch my head. It baffles me that I didn’t spend my first night of independence curled up in a ball on the floor after consuming inordinate amounts of Sprite Remix and Bacardi 151 or running through the streets of Georgetown with an uncapped, unconcealed bottle of the same concoction.

But such is the way with life. The beginning provides hardly any indication of where the path will take us. And, at the end, four years of college culminate in a marvelous set of memories, experiences and life lessons that you could never have scripted or predicted. There’s always a point, however, when all those have to be reduced to a box on the top shelf of your closet, a few envelopes in the drawer of your desk or a crate under your bed.

I don’t remember what my first conversation by the river was about. My roommate and I had gone to check out the M Street strip and that’s where we ended up. The second time I sat by the river was midway through junior year, when I pondered goals and dreams, hopes and ambitions, with a friend after having brunch at J-Paul’s.

It brought tears to my eyes about this time a year ago when I realized most of my friends, then seniors, would not be returning to share this wonderful experience that is college for one more year. And it brings tears to my eyes now to realize that, for me too, it’s finally over.

There are some points in life when the fear of growing up is paralyzing. The last time it got to me was in August 1997, just before my 13th birthday. I cried myself to sleep one night because I didn’t want to become a teenager. From what I knew from television and movies, it was the most confusing and emotionally agonizing time of your life.

What a preposterous notion that was. I wouldn’t trade the last eight years for anything.

Graduation is another one of those points in life. The sentence you’ve been spending four years composing with semicolons and commas and ellipses is almost at an end. And there has to be a period at the end. It’s the only way to get to the next chapter.

Eventually you’ve got to cast aside your concerns and set off into the world on your own. If you’ve placed your wagers well, you can be certain that you’ll find success, whatever you decide to do.

Even better, you’ll have a handful of dance partners as well.

Michael Kurdyla is a senior in the College. He is a former senior sports editor, senior Web editor, managing editor, editor in chief and chair of The Hoya’s board of directors.