Charles Nailen/The Hoya Tim Sullivan

If you were to ask people who really know me well to describe me, they would tell you that I see the world in superlatives and Top 10 lists. I am constantly making unnecessarily strong claims about things most people never even think about, like “Going to a Notre Dame home football game is the seminal American experience.” My notebooks are littered with irrelevant Top 10 lists I have written over the years like “The Top 10 Books That Are Considered Great by the Literary Community that I Hated.” (Heart of Darkness won, for the record.) I am downright obsessed with figuring out where things fit into the broader scheme of things, and I think about it all the time.

Call it obsessive-compulsive disorder if you must, but I prefer to think of it as colorful and charming.

Now, with something like two-and-a-half weeks left until graduation, I find that I can’t put a label on my time at Georgetown, at least not yet. This is due in large part to two things: first, I am not quite ready to admit that it’s over, and second, the past four years have been far too rich to boil down into some throwaway cliche like “they were the best four years of my life.” That simply wouldn’t do justice to the depth and breadth of what I’ve experienced at Georgetown.

But how on earth do I begin to put into words my four years here? I wouldn’t just want to list the stuff that I’ve done – I have a resume for that. I could tell some good stories about meeting Charlton Heston or how I got the scar on my left hand by putting my hand through a glass lampshade junior year, but that wouldn’t capture it either.

Here’s what I do know: In a tremendously broad sense, my four years at Georgetown helped in large part to make me who I am today. Of course, any English professor worth their salt would circle that sentence and write either “vague” or “trite” next to it.

And I guess that’s the problem with trying to put four years into one neat little conclusion; how do you do it without trivializing its significance with pithy rhetoric?

William Wordsworth talked about a similar problem in The Prelude. Talking about his inability to describe a particularly intense experience, he wrote that in order to fully convey his feelings he “should need colours and words that are unknown to man.”

If Wordsworth couldn’t do it, what chance do I have? I’m not even British.

And even if I did know how to say it, I’m not sure I would know what to say about the larger significance of my education. It’s far too soon to say what the impact of our time here will be on us. In my mind, the larger meaning of your education can’t be known for years, because the measure of your education isn’t your GPA or the number of initials after your name, it’s the kind of person you become.

So instead of trying to do the impossible and encapsulate my four years into 1,000 words, I can’t think of anything more appropriate to do than say thank you to the people that have helped me get here.

But first I want to say thank you to Georgetown itself. This Hilltop has seen class after class come and go, but it has left an indelible mark on everyone fortunate enough to pass through its gates, and I am no exception. For the rest of my life, I will irreducibly be a “Georgetown person,” and that’s something I’m tremendously proud of.

I also owe a heartfelt thanks to THE HOYA. At times, I wondered why I spent so much time in the filthy confines of Leavey 421, but it was worth every minute. From sitting courtside at the Big East Tournament to interviewing Jesse Ventura to meeting some of my best friends, many of my best memories of Georgetown are thanks to this newspaper. I hope I served you well.

At their root, institutions are really just a collection of people, and it’s these people that really deserve thanks for the way they have helped shape me in the last four years.

I have had the opportunity to learn from a spectacular group of professors, people like Scott Pilarz, Otto Hentz, Paul Betz, Wayne Knoll, Daniel Porterfield, Joan Holmer, Douglas Reed, Paul Begala, Anthony Arend, James Lengle and Mike Ryan. For as much as they’ve taught me how about government, English and various other disciplines, they’ve also taught me that great paradox of a liberal arts education: the more you know, the more you realize you don’t know, and for every question you answer, you discover countless more that still need answering. They have also been wonderful examples of how to live, and to them I will be forever grateful.

My friends have also been a huge part of my education, if not my schooling, from teaching me to say “y’all” and how to play flip-cup, to teaching me to take myself less seriously.

Most importantly, my family has given me more than anyone could ever think to ask. My parents, my first teachers, have been an unending source of support, inspiration, advice and love. My little brother Kevin has been just about the best kid brother you could ask for, and he also gives me an excuse to watch cartoons and drink orange soda. Thanks guys.

In the next few weeks, the class of 2003 is certain to hear all kinds of metaphors about moving on, including the one about how one chapter in our lives is ending and another one is beginning. When you hear metaphors like that, it’s easy to fall into the trap of thinking that the speaker is describing life more as an anthology of short stories than a novel. There’s “The High School Story,”The Georgetown Years,”Post-Graduate Life” and “Career and Family,” all unrelated but focusing on some character with the same name. But that’s not what it means when people tell us that one chapter is over and another beginning; like any good novel, each new chapter of our lives builds on the last, so that by the last chapter, you’ve ended up with a pretty good story from front to back.

So as I head off into the great unknown of the next chapter, I know that no matter what, my time at Georgetown has been a page-turner, and I hope the rest of the story is just as good.

And if I had it all to do over again, I wouldn’t hesitate for a second. You can’t ask for anything more than that, can you?

Tim Sullivan is a senior in the College. He has served as Editor in Chief, Senior News Editor and Chair of THE HOYA’s Board of Directors.