KEEGAN FRANCL
franclkl@lopers.unk.edu

Shakespeare poetically claimed, “All the world is a stage, and we are merely players,”
As I’m approaching a new stage in life, I can’t help but reflect on the growth I’ve experienced in the long five years I’ve attended UNK. 

During my dramatic college saga, I’ve learned some harsh lessons including:

• A perm to look more like Tori Kelly is actually not a good idea. I was nicknamed “Ramen Noodle Head” for next year.

• Work out regularly. The benefits physically and mentally cannot be more overstated.

• I am not required to become besties with my roommate. 

• Acquire a personality. I guess watching Netflix doesn’t count as hobby. (So I’m told.) 

• My eighth-grade closet is not appropriate for college.  

• Don’t announce to my Uni-friends every time I drop out because I will be back as soon as the semester begins and I start feeling major FOMO.

• Walking the streets of Germany alone at 1 am is not safe or cute. Life isn’t a Hallmark movie. 

• No one owes me anything. Just because I have fellow students and acquaintances sitting at my table at Cunningham’s, racking up a hefty bill, doesn’t mean they will leave me more than a $2-dollar tip. Oh! And it’s unprofessional to message that person on Facebook to ask if they have manners.

• And finally, grades aren’t everything but the friends you make in college are. So, shout out to Madison Kelber for being my only friend through this wild journey. I love you, sister.

Change is great. I openly embrace a new, dramatic hair-do or alternative fashion choices. I try to be realistic with myself when I’m wrong in a situation and need to make self-improvements. 

Yet, I can’t help but feel unsettled about this changing new stage of existence. 
Believe me, I have been romanticizing my post-college life since the day I became a freshman Loper. 

I imagined a Carrie Bradshaw in Sex and the City situation. You know? Living fashionably in Manhattan, New York off a writer’s salary. I had it all planned out.

Now that graduation is two weeks away, I can’t help but fear the reality of playing the part as the 8am-5pm crusty office slave for the rest of my life. 

Shakespeare’s quote is more pragmatic than poetic. I wish he would have been more glamorous and say, “All the world is a stage, and you get a pair of Manolo Blahnik’s every time you move on to the next one,”

But he didn’t. He said we are merely players moving in and out of life’s stages. And maybe that’s the beauty of life. We don’t know what the set of the stage looks like until the curtain draws and reveals something better than we imagined for ourselves. 

We humans are limited in our thinking of what’s possible for us. Perhaps it’s better to let go and let life lead us to our destiny. 

I’m hoping my destiny involves a Louis Vuitton store somewhere in the streets of Paris but until then, I’ll keep you posted.  

Au Revoir, friends.
– Keegan