goodbye NYU

[Edited many months later: Who are all of you people that are searching for the NYU Bobcat? Do you just want to see what it looks like? Are you using this photo for something? I'm totally okay with that, though I'd prefer you told me about what you're using it for and didn't use it for anything commercial without my permission. Are you applying to NYU and looking to see what you're getting into? Tell me! Leave a comment or email me! This post is responsible for half the traffic to my site; I am so curious about why.]

This is the NYU bobcat. Ridiculous, right? Half of our sports teams (possibly the club teams?) are still the Fighting (Fightin'?) Violets, but for some reason, the other half call themselves the Bobcats (possibly the DIII teams?). According to Wikipedia, our school mascot is "Violet D. Bobcat," which sounds just about right. The best part? The school named the new mascot after the library's search engine, which is called Bobcat (for 'Bobst Catalogue'?), but sadly not "Violet D. Bobcat."

Funny, this is all coming together now. The ridiculousness, the library connection, my soon-to-be outdated use of the possessive 'our' when referring to NYU. Today is my last day of work, which is also my last day at NYU, and so far, I find it to be a little anti-climactic. I've spent five years as part of this "community," which is a loaded word at NYU for reasons too boring to expand upon, and I'm not really sure how I feel about leaving it. I'm going to miss a lot of individual parts of NYU, but on the whole, I really dislike NYU for a lot of reasons, most of which are more than tangentially related to my six-figure student loan debt. However, and beware because this is going to be a little cheesy, I've changed a lot in the past five years, almost entirely for the better (I hope). NYU is the place where I became an adult, the place where I became a person that I actually like, and the place where I met most of the important people in my life. So much as I am ambivalent towards the institution, I'm still sad to leave it.

At the same time, I can still honestly say that most NYU students are complete morons, and I'm really ready to not dodge tourists and film crews on my way to work anymore. I've spent the past five years walking around the same streets, which I've watched become increasingly generic and gentrified, and I'm ready to move on. Sometimes I feel like I haven't really graduated (surprising, right? Since I'm working at my undergraduate school, in the same job that I had for two years as a student), and I think it's time to move on and do something new.

Which doesn't change the fact that I've been sitting in Bobst for the past two hours, because the library is the only place that I'll actually physically miss. Which really shouldn't surprise you since my new life goal is to get paid to hang out in libraries. And that life goal is going to be a lot harder if I don't get into library school, so I'm going to go work on my UWM application.